Previously, I’ve only used Microsoft-centric solutions, but for an upcoming ASP.Net project I’m considering using Mono and hosting it on a Linux Amazon EC2 instance. Based on the responses to my previous question, this sounds doable. However, I’m most comfortable with VB.Net and I’m wondering how well Mono supports it.
Does anyone have first-hand experience writing ASP.Net applications for Mono using VB.Net? If so, I’d like to know how it went, what kind of compatibility issues you ran into, and if you consider Mono’s VB.Net support ready for use on a production site?
I know Mono’s C#.Net support is very good, so that’s my fall-back plan, but I’d really prefer to use VB.Net.
The VB compiler hasn’t been abandoned, it’s just a lack of time that is preventing the required work to update to newer VB versions.
Currently vbnc has support for VB 8 (aka Visual Studio 2005), with a few minor features from newer VB versions.
The easiest and safest would be to precompile your site on Windows, in which case you won’t have to deal with any potential compiler issues (and you can use the most recent Visual Studio version). If you take this route you shouldn’t run into any bugs you wouldn’t hit using C# [1]
[1]: You’d be referencing one assembly more: Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll, which could be a source of bugs – but if you adhere to what is considered good programming practice for VB (turn on Option Strict) the chances that you’ll hit any significant new bugs is pretty low.