From InfoWorld: Visual Basic, originally released by Microsoft in early 1991, may seem a bit long in the tooth compared to newer languages like Java, PHP, or Apple's six-month-old Swift. But it still has a following, and Microsoft mapped out a list of improvements this week.
Version 14, timed to ship with the planned Visual Studio 2015 software development platform, features the themes of making common coding patterns cleaner, with "easy-to-grasp" syntax, and fixing up "irritating corners" of the language, says Lucian Wischik, program manager for Microsoft's Visual Basic team, in a blog post this week.
"This release will be easier to digest than was Visual Basic 12, with its introduction of async," he says. "The version number of Visual Basic has gone straight from 12 to 14, skipping 13. We did this to keep in line with the version numbering of Visual Studio itself." Visual Studio 2015 currently is in a preview mode; general availability could happen next spring.
The upgrade includes a new ?. operator, providing an easier way to check for whether an element is null. "It's useful because production-quality code is typically littered with hundreds of null-checks all over the place, and ?. will make them all easier to read," Wischik says.
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