What is allowed in Visual Basic that's prohibited in C# (or vice versa)?

Question

This is code-related as in what the compiler will allow you to do in one language, but not allow you to do in another language (e.g. optional parameters in

Answer 1

One of the overlooked or simply misunderstood features of the VB language is calling a function which has a ByRef parameter. Most languages support only a single method of passing parameters by reference: that is the scenarios directly supported by the CLR.

The CLR has a lot of restrictions on the type of values it supports for ByRef parameters and these restrictions get in the way of VB’s goal to be a flexible language. Hence the compiler goes to great lengths to be flexible and support multiple avenues of ByRef passing, much beyond what the CLR natively allows.

C# 4 now supports two versions of reference passing. In addition to the one available since 1.0 the ref modifier is now optional when making an interop call to a COM object.