Programming Language Choices

What should be important to developers is selecting a language that enables 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 list is an overview of the Microsoft-supported languages for .NET development with Visual Studio:

C#—C# is a programming language designed for those who are familiar and comfortable programming in C-style languages (such as C, C++, and Java). C# is type safe, object oriented, and targeted for rapid application development. C# developers tend to spend more of their time inside the Visual Studio code editor and less time with the designers.

Visual Basic .NET—VB.NET is about productivity. Developers can rapidly build type-safe, object-oriented applications. Although VB developers have full access to all code constructs in .NET, they tend to use VB.NET because of the productivity features inside the IDE, and they are already familiar with it from past experience with VB (or a similar language built on Basic).

C++—With C++, developers can build .NET managed applications. However, they can also create Windows-based applications that do not rely on .NET. Most C++ developers have a C background and are therefore more comfortable inside the C++ world than they are with other languages. A C++ developer also has access to build against Active Template Library (ATL), the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) libraries, and the C Runtime (CRT) library.

Visual F#—The F# language is said to be multiparadigm because it allows for functional, object-oriented, and imperative programming. It brings .NET developers a solution to many difficult programming problems. There are several features of F#, including lightweight function types, functions as values, function composition and pipelining, recursive functions, and lambda expressions, to name a few. F# makes for simpler programming of math, scientific, engineering, and symbolic analysis (such as machine learning) problems. Visual Studio 2015 introduces F# 4.0 developed by both Microsoft and the open source community.

TypeScript—Visual Studio 2015 includes support for TypeScript. TypeScript is an answer to the many developers writing more and more JavaScript on a daily basis but longing for more of the language and IDE features they are accustomed to from other languages. TypeScript is a strongly typed superset of JavaScript. It allows JavaScript developers to write JavaScript in a faster, cleaner, and more productive way. The language syntax is JavaScript. The compiler outputs TypeScript to plain JavaScript that can be run in any browser on any platform.