Writing Add-Ins for Visual Studio .NET

Using Multiple Languages in Add-ins

Thus far, you have only used Visual Basic in the code for your add-ins. Now, I am going to show you how to use another language provided by Visual Studio .NET. This language is C#, the latest addition to Visual Studio. In my years in Windows applications development, I have stuck primarily to Visual Basic. With the advent of .NET, I determined to not only take the paradigm switch to VB .NET, but also to learn the newest language, C#.

To those of you who have invested a lot of time in learning and using C++, C# offers a big advantage in that you do not have to discard what you have already learned in order to learn this new language. There are some new concepts and techniques, and a new class library to learn, but the syntax is similar to C++.

If you have majored in Visual Basic as I have, C# appears to have been built on the Visual Basic programming model, as you will see in the code comparison in the next section. In actuality, C# draws from the C family of languages and Visual Basic, and the result is a language that is somewhere in the middle of the two. The way I look at it is that C# looks like Visual Basic with the addition of semicolons and braces from C and C++.