In one sense, C# can be seen as being the same thing to programming languages as .NET is to the Windows environment. Just as Microsoft has been adding more and more features to Windows and the Windows API over the past decade, Visual Basic and C++ have undergone expansion. Although Visual Basic and C++ have ended up as hugely powerful languages as a result of this, both languages also suffer from problems due to the legacies of how they have evolved.
In the case of Visual Basic 6 and earlier, the main strength of the language was the fact that it was simple to understand and didn’t make many programming tasks easy, largely hiding the details of the Windows API and the COM component infrastructure from the developer. The downside to this was that Visual Basic was never truly object-oriented, so that large applications quickly become disorganized and hard to maintain. As well as this, because Visual Basic’s syntax was inherited from early versions of BASIC (which, in turn, was designed to be intuitively simple for beginning programmers to understand, rather than to write large commercial applications), it didn’t really lend itself to well-structured or object-oriented programs.



C#在某種程度上可以看作是.NET面向Windows環(huán)境的一種編程語言。在過去的十幾年里，Microsoft給Windows和 Windows API添加了許多功能，VB和C++也經(jīng)歷了許多變化。雖然VB和C++最終已成為非常強(qiáng)大的語言，但這兩種語言也存在問題，因?yàn)樗鼈儽Ａ袅嗽瓉淼囊恍﹥?nèi)容。
對(duì)于Visual Basic來說，它的主要優(yōu)點(diǎn)是很容易理解，許多編程工作都很容易完成，基本上隱藏了Windows API和COM組件結(jié)構(gòu)的內(nèi)涵。其缺點(diǎn)是Visual Basic從來沒有實(shí)現(xiàn)真正意義上的面向?qū)ο?，所以大型?yīng)用程序很難分解和維護(hù)。另外，因?yàn)閂B的語法繼承于BASIC的早期版本(BASIC主要是為了讓初學(xué)者更容易理解，而不是為了編寫大型商業(yè)應(yīng)用程序)，所以不能真正成為結(jié)構(gòu)化或面向?qū)ο蟮木幊陶Z言。