Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but will no longer add new features or evolve the language. From a report: "Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class Library, Console, Windows Forms, WPF, Worker Service, [and] ASP.NET Core Web API ... to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want [sic] to migrate their applications to .NET Core," the .NET team wrote in a post to the Microsoft DevBlogs. "Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language ... The future of Visual Basic ... will focus on stability, the application types listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic."

When Microsoft released the .NET version of Visual Basic, originally called Visual Basic .NET, alongside C# at the beginning of the .NET era, the two languages were evolved together and had roughly identical feature sets. But this changed over time, with professional developers adopting C# and many fans of classic VB simply giving up on the more complex but powerful .NET versions of the environment. Today, virtually all of Microsoft's relevant developer documentation is in C# only, with VB source code examples ever harder to find.

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