The original Visual Basic .NET was released alongside Visual C# and ASP.NET in 2002. Significant changes broke backward compatibility with older versions and caused a rift within the developer community.
Visual Basic 2010 (VB 10.0)
In 2007, Microsoft planned to use the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) for the upcoming Visual Basic 10 (2010), formerly known as VBx. However, Microsoft shifted to a co-evolution strategy between Visual Basic and sister language C# to bring both languages into closer parity with one another. Visual Basic's innate ability to interact dynamically with CLR and COM objects has been enhanced to work with Dynamic languages built on the DLR such as IronPython and IronRuby. The Visual Basic compiler was improved to infer line continuation in a set of common contexts in this version, lifting in many cases the requirement for the " _" line continuation character. Also in version 10.0 existing support of inline Functions was complemented with support for inline Subs as well as multi-line versions of both Sub and Function lambdas.
For a full list of language features added to Visual Basic 10.0 see the "What's New in Visual Basic 2010" document published by Microsoft..NET Framework 4 and Visual Basic 2010 were released together.Visual Studio 2010 is available now, and was released on April 12 2010.Also see Release Candidate.Microsoft currently offers Visual Studio 2010 RC free-of-charge.
