Any value gained in converting a legacy code base from VB to C#?

Question

Quick searches on the topic result in articles such as:

• 10 Reasons Why Visual Basic is Better Than C#
• Top 10 reasons VB.NET is better than C# (old article)

This thread over at the programmers stack exchange even presents some interesting and humorous arguments but most center around culture, syntax, and learn-ability. This article made the "technical debt" argument for why they performed the conversion. Basically, everyone wanted to stop using VB.NET.

I don't expect to drastically change the code base of a legacy system for any of the above reasons. However, the current system has major issues: poor performance and substantial logic errors. But this alone does not merit a conversion, does it? It should also be noted that the developers are equally strong in each language so that doesn't have a bearing on the question.

Are there any substantial benefits, such as performance gains, that would be achieved by converting 65K lines of code from VB to C#?

After my research, I'm not convinced that a conversion would be beneficial.

Answer 1

As the author of the "technical debt" post that you linked in your question, I'd say that in your case it's probably not worth converting the project from VB .NET to C#.

In our case, the entire team had made the decision to move away from Visual Basic and had already started writing many newer portions of the system in C#. We were all capable of working with either language but preferred C# and hated having to remember to chop the semicolons off of the end of each line when we needed to dip into the VB portion of the code. ;-)

As I pointed out in my post, I once made the decision against converting a VB .NET project at a previous job because I didn't feel like it was a justifiable cost to the project as a whole. In that case the code wasn't in great shape to begin with and we would have had a "garbage in, garbage out" effect if we did a conversion. Instead, we focused on fixing the issues with the VB .NET and that turned out to be a much better way for us to spend our time and energy. From reading your question it sounds like you are in the same boat. You are better off spending time addressing the issues in the existing code base than trying to convert it.