used by Microsoft as the basis for two new programming languages in their new "Integrated Development Environment (IDE)". These languages were named C# and VB.NET. In February 2017, Microsoft communicated their intent to end the "co-evolution" strategy between the two languages that had existed since 2010 and allow the two languages to again evolve independently. C# is now the dominant Microsoft-based development language. Developers will notice that VB 15 (first appearing in Visual Studio 2017) lacks certain language capabilities contained in the new C# 7.3. Language comparison Though C# and VB.NET are syntactically very different, that is where the differences mostly end. Microsoft developed both of these languages to be part of the same .NET Framework development platform. They are both developed, managed, and supported by the same language development team at Microsoft. They compile to the same intermediate language (IL), which runs against the same .NET Framework runtime libraries. Although there are some differences in the programming constructs (discussed further below), their differences are primarily syntactic and, assuming one avoids the Visual Basic "Compatibility" libraries provided by Microsoft to aid conversion from VB6, almost every command in VB has an equivalent command in C# and vice versa. Lastly, both languages reference the same Base Classes of the .NET Framework to extend their functionality. As a result, with few exceptions, a program written in either language can be run through a simple syntax converter to translate to the other. There are many open source and commercially available products for this task. The only fundamental differences between the languages can be found in the implementation of interfaces and in the declaration, raising and handling of events. Although both languages are high-level programming languages, VB.NET maintains a slightly higher level of abstraction in some respects. Runtime multi-language support One of the main goals of .NET has been its multi-language support. The intent of the design was that all of the various Microsoft languages should have the same level of access to all OS features, should be able to expose the same level of power and usability, and simplify calling from a module in one language to that written in another language. In implementation, all .NET programming languages share the same runtime engine, uniform abstract syntax tree, and Common Intermediate Language. Additionally all .NET languages have access to platform features including garbage collection, cross language inheritance, exception handling, and debugging. This allows the