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November 15, 2004

RANT: People who translate code unnecessarily

Like Daniel, I'm advocate of developers being conversant in both VB.NET and C#. But what I am not an advocate of is people who feel the necessity to translate code between the two languages just because some class they found is not in their preferred language. I get a lot of emails about the camera API proof-of-concept I posted a while back, and most of them are from VBers who have written the same code but in VB.NET.

WHY DO YOU DO FEEL THE NEED TO DO THIS?!??!

Don't you know that you can have both C# and VB.NET projects in the same solution? Are Microsoft doing a bad job at educating users or do you just not know how to use your development environment properly? Don't you understand that whether the ASCII characters you see strung together before you form a C# snippet or VB.NET, it does not matter when you compile the application?

If you follow the advice of Daniel and myself, then you will have no problems with having mixed language projects in your solution. In fact, I'd say that that is the preferred method of making the most of a useful class! Don't waste project budget by needlessly rewriting code just because (a) you can and/or (b) prefer a particular language. You ain't going to gain anything by translating code

I'm fine with people translating snippets, like Daniel does. Heck, I even post some snippets purely in VB. Just don't waste time translating entire class libraries. There's more important things you can be doing with your time.