In case you’ve been under a rock recently, Visual Studio 2008 was released recently which supports a lot of functional capabilities like lambda expressions. I’ve been playing around with the lambda syntax in both C# and VB.NET recently and the addition to the languages is great. I did run into one thing that is still frustrating me in VB.NET, though.

Check out the below C# snippet:

TryTimes(() =>
{
  Console.WriteLine("hi there.");
  throw new Exception("haha");
  Console.WriteLine("hi there after .");
}, 5);

This is the prototype for the usage of a function that could try an operation a certain number of times and then fail if the operation didn’t succeed after N number of tries. Obviously, the above code sample will fail every time, but the idea could work alright for file I/O if you’re unsure if anyone else might have locks on the file.

The above is impossible to do in VB.NET, though, because VB.NET does not support multi-line lambda expressions. The C# supports them by wrapping the expressions in curly braces, essentially making the lambda expression a block. I wanted to emulate the same thing with VB.NET, but after some fruitless web searches, I came across this MSDN forum posting on VB.NET and lambdas which then pointed to Paul Vick’s post on the VB 2008 features that are still in.

I’ve been wanting the equivalent of anonymous delegates in VB for a long time and I thought, with lambda expressions, I might finally get them. We are a lot closer, but they still don’t provide quite the benefit that they could have had we gotten multi-line lambda support. I guess those annoying line continuation characters in VB mess this all up. I think if I could change anything about VB, it would be to make those optional.

On the positive side, though, the intellisense support for VB.NET has increased substantially. For that, I am thankful.