Question

Coming from C#…

I was looking at this website

http://www.harding.edu/fmccown/vbnet_csharp_comparison.html

And noticed that it said

public static void Main(string[] args) {

is equivalent to

Overloads Shared Sub Main(ByVal args() As String) 

So… what is that “Overloads” all about?

Answer 1

It is a mistake, nothing is getting overloaded. There is no pre-baked Sub Main() anywhere, especially not in a class named HelloWorld. It happens to work because the vb.net compiler isn’t very picky about it. Paste this code in a class to see for yourself:

Class Test
    Overloads Sub IdontOverloadAnything()

    End Sub
End Class

The VB.NET compiler tends to make magic happen. This is not one of those cases, the Main() magic is in the CLR. Most any C# programmer would consider this a bug in the language. I can’t disagree.