Hi,

I am still using VB.NET on many of my LLBLGen projects. Many of them are on .NET 8.

The breaking changes for version 5.12 say taht "VB.NET istn't a supported language on .NET 9".

https://www.llblgen.com/Documentation/5.12/Designer/BreakingChanges.htm

Why is that? What is the long term strategy regarding VB.NET? Can I continue using VB.NET if I create a custom template?

Thanks,

andreas

VB.NET isn't a language that gets any updates from Microsoft (the development has basically stalled, Vick has moved on from the project since a couple of years I think), and for EF Core it's not a supported language as well. The generated code is therefore for new .NET frameworks (.net 9+), going forward, not in VB.NET anymore. That doesn't mean you can't use it in your own VB.NET projects, they should work fine in your projects. It also doesn't mean we're removing VB.NET support from earlier .NET frameworks, what we shipped is what will stay.

Thanks for getting back to me.

I know that Microsoft isn't working on VB.NET anymore. But if you have a bunch of projects using it, they don't just magically go away - and I will still need to port them to the newest .NET version from time to time.

So when I upgrade a project to .NET 9, what is going to happen? Is it just the template that is missing, and that I have to copy over (and possibly adapt) from the previous version, or are there other things I need to do?

Thanks,

andreas

acl wrote:

Thanks for getting back to me.

I know that Microsoft isn't working on VB.NET anymore. But if you have a bunch of projects using it, they don't just magically go away - and I will still need to port them to the newest .NET version from time to time.

So when I upgrade a project to .NET 9, what is going to happen? Is it just the template that is missing, and that I have to copy over (and possibly adapt) from the previous version, or are there other things I need to do?

If you generate code in VB.NET as well, generating code for .net 9 for our framework will generate code as before but no vb proj projects (as these aren't there). So you have to manually add those. I think that's fairly minor. If we have to introduce a template for VB.NET for a future version/feature then it might not get added but I highly doubt that will ever happen.

So the current functionality of the designer generates fine for our framework and as we don't expect many new features in the future, I think it'll be fine. We mainly cut it as it was very cumbersome to support newer frameworks for vb.net (also because microsoft didn't even bother to do that). Except perhaps the missing vbproj files.

I'd recommend generating code for C# btw, even though you use it a VB.NET project. Some constructs with e.g. lambdas were cumbersome to create in the templates.

Ok thanks! It's mainly existing projects; so the proj file is there.

acl wrote:

Ok thanks! It's mainly existing projects; so the proj file is there.

True, and as the new .net project files don't contain references to all the files generated, it's not a big deal the file isn't updated anymore like it was back on .net framework so a new entity will be picked up just fine