The Mint

As the result of a rather insulting discussion with an anti-VB coworker I challenge myself to jump the fence from VB to C# land. I wanted to experience first hand what all the fuss  was about. So I dove head-first into building my first C# project. That was nearly four months ago.

What an incredible four months it has been. The first couple of nights I was getting migraines looking at all the curly braces. I was complaining about the case sensitivity, the Spanish style of defining variables and the fact that I had to explicitly add () to call a method (this is unnecessary in VB.NET). This continued for the first couple of days with me complaining as I discovered the differences that I viewed as silly.

After about three and a half weeks of forcing myself to stick with it something happened. I can’t really describe it but I’ll try. Bear with me as this may get a little weird.

Imagine yourself sitting in a dark cell. The walls and floor are crude concrete with rough edges. The only light source is a single flickering candle. You sit at a small table squinting your eyes trying to focus on the paper before you. In your hand you’re clutching tightly to a piece of charcoal. You’re doing what you love and creating art with nothing more than coal. You’re not even sure how you ended up using charcoal but you’ve managed to figure out how to draw with it and it works well enough. Despite the darkness you are incredibly happy and content to continue your coal drawing in the dim light. Suddenly you hear the clanking of metal keys. A lock clicks and a huge door opens flooding the room with light revealing a pencil sitting on the very desk next to you. You pick it up and attempt to continue your drawing. At first you can’t really see as the light blinds you. You close your eyes complaining it’s too bright. You also complain that the pencil is too small and it’s strokes too fine. As your eyes adjust to the light you realize that you can actually have a clearer view of your brightly lit paper. And even though it will require more attention to detail, you’re pleased with the great control you have over your new drawing tool.

Yeah it was like that. A bulb came on and suddenly I realized I preferred working with C#. The brush was finer and required great attention to detail but offered so much more control. As time went on I grew to love the language. Every night I worked with C# only to go back to work where everything is VB.NET. I actually hate having to use VB.NET. I’m not going so far as to claim one is superior to the other but for my personal preference I enjoy C# and can’t stand VB.NET. It’s quite a 180 and no one is more surprised than I am.

The first thing to do is apologize to my C# loving coworker. The next thing is to find a way to introduce some C# projects at work. It won’t be easy as the software development manager doesn’t like C# and prefers VB.NET but if I’m to enjoy my job and feel productive I can’t deal with VB.NET everyday.