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Something I’m not to clear about, I understand there are differences between C# and VB.NET (mainly in the use of pointers) but why if both have a Common CLR, does XNA (for example) only work with C# and not VB.NET, or is it that the add ins to visual studio have been aimed at C# rather than VB.Net, and infact the language extensions work in both
Sorry if it’s a obvious question, thought I’d ask
The CLR has been ported to various platforms, not all of which are equal. The XBox 360 CLR, for instance, does not have Reflection.Emit or even all of the IL ops that the full CLR does. Hence, a different compiler may emit IL codes that are legal on the full CLR, but illegal on the Compact CLR.
The other issue is the availability of class libraries. The full BCL includes the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace, which is automatically referenced by the VB.NET compiler. This contains VB6 compatibility functions, the My namespace features, as well as some compiler helper functions, and is commonly referred to as the VB.NET runtime.
Whenever the CLR is ported, certain assemblies are ported – and others are not. For the XBox, Microsoft.VisualBasic was not ported. This means that you cannot reference anything from that namespace. While it’s fairly easy to not reference the compatibility or My namespaces, the compiler services can be inserted into the compiled IL without you explicitly calling them.
In VB.NET 8, you could pass an undocumented and unsupported -novbruntimeref switch to vbc.exe to keep it from referencing Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll. Unfortunately, this would sometimes cause odd compiler errors. In VB.NET 9, it’s become documented and supported and renamed to /vbruntime.
The 3rd case is addins and Visual Studio support. This is up to the individual packages, as to whether they support templates, code gen, etc. for each language. I believe some 3rd parties have released VB.NET templates for XNA, though it’s not officially supported.
Bottom line, I guess, is that it’s a mix of technical concerns (CLR ports, BCL availability, compiler IL output) and support (testing, funding, and addins for other languages).