Keep Advancing VB.NET for Modern Workloads

Question

Visual Basic has been a cornerstone of Microsoft’s developer ecosystem for decades. It continues to power countless business-critical applications, especially in enterprises that rely on stability, readability, and rapid development.

While I understand Microsoft’s current stance that VB.NET is a “stable language” with no new workloads planned, I believe this decision risks sidelining a vibrant community and a large base of production systems. Many organizations would benefit from VB.NET being able to participate in modern .NET workloads such as Blazor, MAUI, and cloud-native development.

Why this matters:

VB.NET remains one of the most approachable languages for new developers.

Enterprises with large VB codebases need a path forward that doesn’t force costly rewrites.

Allowing VB to evolve alongside C# would strengthen the overall .NET ecosystem by giving developers choice without fragmentation.

Request: Please reconsider the decision to freeze VB.NET’s evolution. Even incremental updates—such as enabling new workloads, modern syntax features, or tooling improvements—would go a long way toward keeping VB a first-class citizen in .NET.

The community is ready to support and contribute ideas. VB.NET deserves not just preservation, but a future.

Answer 1

1. Microsoft Support: Microsoft could continue minor but meaningful updates like add support for modern .NET SDK-style projects. Improve compatibility with .NET 6–9 runtime features. Introduce modern syntax sugar for async, records, pattern matching, and lambdas.
2. Community Involvement: Encourage community-driven evolution via GitHub proposals and Roslyn compiler contributions. Similar to F#, allow the community to propose and vote on new VB.NET features. Form a Vb.NET Foundation subgroup under the .NET Foundation to push innovation.
3. Interop with C# and F# by improve interoperability tools to mix VB.NET with C# or F# in the same solution easily. Example: use Vb.NET for business logic and C# for front-end Blazor components.
4. Enterprise Adoption where microsoft or partners can release migration toolkits for:

 modern .NET APIs (without full rewrite. WinForms/WPF VB.NET → .NET 8 modern builds.