We get a lot of emails from Programmer's Heaven users. Amongst the requests that we do people's homework, which we ignore, we also get some more interesting questions sent to us too. We figured that when we do, we may as well share our answers more widely, and also this gives other folks a chance to give their input too. Recently we got one from someone who had discovered us through the C# School e-book and asked, "please kindly advise which of the two, C# and VB .NET is better for developing commercial applications like Payroll".

The Similarities

Both languages run in the Common Language Runtime and allow you to have full access to the .Net Class Library. This means that pretty much whatever is in the .Net Class Library is equally available to both VB.NET and C#.NET. Both languages have a similar feature set too, providing strong support for Object Oriented Programming, which is good for developing database-backed applications, as your Payroll surely will be...