Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Programming Language Choices

What should be important to developers is selecting a language that allows you to be productive and has a high degree of support inside the IDE. Productivity is about developing with syntax that is familiar and logical to you. IDE support means the tools can generate code, help you write code, and provide features and artifacts that accelerate your coding. This is where many third-party (non-Microsoft-supported) languages often fall short. It takes a lot to provide IDE support to build the many application types Visual Studio enables.

The following provides an overview of the Microsoft-supported languages for .NET development with Visual Studio:

• Visual Basic—The VB implementation in Visual Studio is about productivity. ...