Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) support in ASP.NET Core #2738
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I logged an issue long time back to use VB alongside with |
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In addition to @reduckted excellent summation, Microsoft's documentation for Razor syntax for ASP.NET Core (as at 2017-10-18) still has numerous references to Visual Basic and using .vbhtml files:
However ScottAddie@MSFT had posted a comment on 2017-07-21:
So is Visual Basic/vb.net/.vbhtml files going to be included in .Net Core? And If so when?? |
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How can we help to make this support happen? I would love to see VB.Net and F# support! |
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I sent a PR to remove the VBHTML references from the ASP.NET Core docs: dotnet/AspNetCore.Docs#5201 There are currently no plans to introduce VBHTML support to ASP.NET Core. We do have F# templates for ASP.NET Core, which are installed as part of the .NET Core SDK. |
Personally, I'm not concerned about VBHTML support because I don't use Razor pages, and don't intend to. As mentioned by @AnthonyDGreen (dotnet/vblang#238 (comment)), it doesn't make sense to add VB support to it because it was rarely used in MVC 5, and, I imagine, would take a very large amount of work for not a lot of gain.
OK, but I'm not really sure what your point is here. If anything, doesn't this just reinforce the fact that there should be VB templates as well? Weren't the F# templates created by the F# community? If the team at Microsoft won't create VB templates, then why can't the VB templates be created by the VB community? |
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@reduckted the question comes down to the demand for it and the cost of it - both the initial cost and the ongoing cost. The demand has been very low, as noted earlier. The cost to create an initial set of templates might not be much, but someone has to maintain them. With F# we have people at Microsoft who are committed to maintaining them. We don't have any such people for VB at this time. Also, one limitation with the F# templates is that they focus more on the API side of things; that is, no Razor or CSHTML (because there's no FSHTML). With VB users my guess is that most users using VB would be expecting a VBHTML experience for MVC, and the cost of producing that is enormous - months and months of work. So, it isn't clear to me that adding limited VB templates would be particularly valuable. |
You may want to speak to @AnthonyDGreen, because that's exactly the opposite of what he has said in the comment that I previously linked to (dotnet/vblang#238 (comment)). I'll quote it this time (emphasis is mine):
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@reduckted - interesting, that is news to me. I'm thinking back to Web Forms days, which was initially designed with concepts that were familiar to VB developers (VB6, specifically), and Web Forms was very HTML-centric (sorta), so that led me to think that VBHTML would be most interesting to that group of people. Then again, that's ~15 year old anec-data 😄 BTW to be clear, we haven't said that we're never going to do it - just that it isn't currently in any plans. |
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I'm a VB fan 😄, which I expect |
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@hishamco Unfortunately Razor was implemented so that VB and C# were separate paths. I've talked to a few people involved and it's quite a large project. |
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@KathleenDollard There are other .NET Core projects that support custom ViewEngines for .pug & .md file types. Surely we can make it work for .vbhtml razorpages files using a .vbproj with |
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@tb-mtg It's all open source if you want to explore it and see what those projects did. The folks that wrote it told me it was a big effort. The size of the effort and the exceedingly low adoption of vbhtml in earlier versions of MVC make it a hard sell. |
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@KathleenDollard I will repeat my question again, If I re-implement the Razor to emit VB instead of C# is that gonna work, or the MVC is tightly coupled on the cshtml C#? |
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MVC's runtime compilation engine uses the Roslyn infrastructure for compiling C#, and expects/requires the C# project system's settings to be passed through Anyone who wants to compile VB at runtime will need to implement a view engine that does that. |
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Thanks @rynowak for you clarification
If I implement a VB view engine - or clone C# one with modification -, what settings that I need to pass into |
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+1 |
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@AnthonyDGreen @KathleenDollard
What do the other 99% use then? |
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Angular, or other similar front-end libraries, I would presume. That's what I use. |
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Actually that is also exactly what I plan to do with our new web projects move to Angular from ASP.Net MVC Razor , I have to do 4 new web projects this year , so if someone keeps count .. LOL |
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VB has been a popular language for many years! As a company we certainly have many code snippets that we would not want to have to re-write in C# Im sure there are many old school web form apps that are due to be re-written especially with the new EU rules coming into play, this would mean that VB would be very much wanted! I find it amazing that microsoft blow so hot and cold on VB one minute its being developed on par, next its the poor relative! Yes new languages and frameworks are coming out but dont just ditch the popular old ones! |
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Glad it's being tracked here, hopefully might see some action then. |
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All signs (weasel words) from MS are that they plan to dumb-down VB.NET, and/or do nothing and wait for others to write the missing bits. I’m over their weasel words, I’m exiting VB.NET development now. |
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I just hope when Microsoft acquires GitHub it doesn't get the same treatment that VB.Net did (being left for dead with empty promises of full support). |
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VBLazor would be similar to uwp/wpf design view, but with two code-behind files, one for server vb.net codes, and another for client (script) codes, with the ability to use MVVM pattern to organize large projects. XAML will be complied to html5, Xaml styles will be compiled to CSS, and VB.NET script codes will be compiled to WebAssembly. |
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I'm closing this because, sadly, it's pretty clear that there is no intention to add VB.NET project templates for ASP.NET Core. |
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@reduckted @muratg @tb-mtg @brunojuliao @rynowak @CheungTatMing @VBDotNetCoder @simonmilne80 @NatShaw @SrqComputerguy @sreenathGanga1988 @mcurros @filippobottega @mrjohnr @beefydog @mevdschee @Baner041986 @hannespreishuber @Webbarrr Finally: A working VB.NET ASP.NET MVC Core Razor sample! services.AddTransient(Of IConfigureOptions(Of MvcViewOptions), VBRazor.VBRazorMvcViewOptionsSetup)()
services.AddSingleton(Of IViewEngine, VBRazor.VBRazorViewEngine)()The VBRazor is just a VB class that implements the IVBRazor Interface: Public Interface IVBRazor
ReadOnly Property Razor As String
End InterfaceThe Razor property uses the xml literals to compose the HTML code and returns it as a string.. Example: Imports VbRazor
Public Class IndexView
Implements IVBRazor
Dim students As List(Of Student)
Public Sub New(students As List(Of Student))
Me.students = students
End Sub
Public ReadOnly Property Razor As String Implements IVBRazor.Razor
Get
Dim x = <html>
<h3> Browse Students</h3>
<p>Select from <%= students.Count() %> students:</p>
<ul>
<%= (Iterator Function()
For Each std In students
Yield <li><%= std.Name %></li>
Next
End Function)() %>
</ul>
</html>
Return x.ToString()
End Get
End Property
End Class
To use the IndexView from the Controller, I passed it to the View method as the model data in the action method, and passed the actual model data to its constructor: Public Function Index() As IActionResult
Return View(New IndexView(Students))
End FunctionThat’s all!! If you run the project, you will see this web page: This was really easy, but needs more work, so I hope you start contribute to this project to make it a real productive tool! The second thing to do, is to add intellisense support for html attributes in xml literals in VB! |
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Truth view engine need to parse sort of template like what we have seen in Razor or Markdown .. etc, but what you did is easy because the final markup generated from the code behind which is what the generated classes from Razor did |
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@hishamco |
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Xml literal is a very good feature that VB only has. Regarding vbhtml it needs time and efforts and I am one of the interested guys from the past, hope if we can start on this soon |
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Hi all, |
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Hi all, |
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@VBAndCs , please try to avoid posting on old closed issues. We try to keep this issue tracker for bugs and feature requests in ASP.NET Core and minimize other discussions. |
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@Eilon |
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@mevdschee |
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I have been following this thread for a long time as a proper full solution really in my opinion should have been on the road map without having to be forced. I was slightly dissapointed though to see after the hard work put in by @VBAndCs that @Eilon would try and stop anyone else trying to help solve the issue for so many people! I can understand there is a lot of pressure, however the fact people are still following this shows its important to a lot of people! Keep up the good work :) |
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Hi everyone, We strongly encourage community activity and features, but we cannot accept certain feature requests or bug fixes because they are not a high enough priority for us to implement. This even includes the case where there's a pull request that includes tests and documentation. Making any change of any size has a cost, including long term cost, and we have to balance that against all the other potential work that we are considering. When it comes to view engines, we are 100% committed to the Razor view engine with support for C#, and a great editor experience in Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, and Visual Studio Code. We believe that there is a great opportunity here for people such as @VBAndCs to create additional projects that work with ASP.NET Core and integrate in a variety of ways. We're happy to link to those projects by having people send PRs to readme files such as the MVC readme. Thanks, |
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To @simonmilne80, @mevdschee and any one who is interested: |
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BTW we're looking to add a mention of Vazor to an upcoming ASP.NET Community Standup. Do you have a blog post we can reference in addition to the GitHub repo? |
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@Eilon |
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This already happened! VBAndCs/Vazor#1 |
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Looking into converting my VB.NET WebForms app to .NET Core Razor Pages. If true that VB will not be supported then what modern ASP.NET path should I migrate to instead? Re-writting the app in C# is not an option. |
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@Gruski if there's a lot of VB.NET code that is "library" code - that is, not even WebForms-specific - then that all works quite fine in the .NET Core / Razor Pages / Blazor world. It's the WebForms vs. Razor (and Blazor) part that's much more work. We did just release a preview of an e-book to help developers migrate from WebForms to Blazor: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/blazor-for-web-forms-developers/index So it might be possible to keep some of your app in VB, and then only the UI would need to be C#. |
You can use a VB.NEt project for the UI as well. Only the cshtml files will contain C# chunks. If you want to avoid the C# code, you can use xml literals in VB.NEt to design the UI as I did in my Vazor project: |
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Although our project is a WebForms project, we are no longer using it as was originally intended. This was an old but large enterprise application that over the years has been converted to solely use Vue.js client side framework calling WebMethods residing in each of the .aspx code behind pages. So there are: no server components (no runat="server" anything), no viewstate, no full page posts (no "form" element). Other than the Load method which dynamically initializes some Vue client side components, the code behind only contains WebMethods. With this in mind and the requirement to move to .NET core what new ASP.NET tech should I migrate the project to if I want to get away from WebForms? MVC to me makes no sense since Vue.js already has the MVC pattern on the client side, which is my opinion is more elegant, so why would I need it on the server? Blazor makes no sense either because that would entail rewriting the entire UI again. |
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@Gruski I would recommend Razor Pages. It's extremely easy to start with: Just created a Pages folder in your ASP.NET Core app and start adding .cshtml files to it. Each page is essentially a URL, and you can put arbitrary HTML in it, then add any C# you want for server logic. Try this tutorial to get started: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/razor-pages/razor-pages-start?view=aspnetcore-3.0&tabs=visual-studio |
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@Eilon Do Razor Pages have code behind to place WebMethods in? Otherwise where would the WebMethods be placed? Looking at it it looks like it still uses a simplified version of server side MVC pattern behind the scenes which is redundant when using Vue. Also no VB support in Razor Pages. |
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Razor Pages don't support WebMethods. I would recommend using MVC for those methods. You can mix Razor Pages and MVC in the same app. |
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@Gruski I have been travelling and just catching up. If you have your UI in Vuew.js, can you just use ASP.NET Core MVC/WebAPI? This works fine. While this article is a bit much in including Angular, it does show the general technique: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/combining-angular-visual-basic-and-net-core-for-developing-modern-web-apps/ There are two areas of issues with support:
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and others
There have been many questions asked about VB.NET support in ASP.NET Core over the past few years. If you follow them, they all lead to dead-ends - either closed with no real response, or they're moved to other repositories that are unrelated to ASP.NET Core (such as somewhere in the dotnet organization).
Over that time, there's been talk of supporting VB. It's completely understandable that ASP.NET Core didn't support VB from the outset. The project was going through a lot of rapid change, so it made sense to focus on C# initially and add support for other languages later. But the idea of supporting VB seemed to get lost along the way.
Here's a brief timeline:
Dec 16, 2014:
Apr 25, 2015:
Nov 19, 2016:
VB Support disappears from the roadmap:
https://github.com/aspnet/Home/wiki/Roadmap/_compare/2138fe4ff8a437e8edefc333189aaa8d9b5afb6a...b49bda1f8f40975b39d14d199a9ddac0a2beb45e
Dec 12, 2017:
VB support seems to have gone from
"It doesn't work yet, but we plan to allow VB"
to
"There will be full support for VB!"
to
"VB is not supported, but shhh, don't tell anyone".
So my first question is:
What happened and why was there no announcement or discussion with the community about this?
It seems strange to go from announcing support for VB.NET in ASP.NET Core in an official blog post, to not supporting it at all without any feedback. Was there any announcement about this? If there was, it certainly wasn't widely published.
My next, and more important question is:
What can the VB community do to help add support for VB.NET to ASP.NET Core?
Are there project templates that we can write?
Are there code generators that we can implement?
What can we do make ASP.NET Core as awesome for VB developers as it is for C# developers?
I've thrown together a simple ASP.NET Core app (link deleted because the repo is out of date) in VB by creating a .NET Core console application, editing the project file and copying the classes generated from the ASP.NET Core C# template. It works fine, and even though it's only very basic, I can't see any reason why VB.NET cannot be supported.
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