“Overloads” keyword in VB.NET

Question

Do you really need this keyword to overload methods? What is the difference between using the overloads keyword vs. just having different method signatures?

Answer 1

It was a design consideration. Of course it (VB) could have been designed to infer overloading by the function signature (like in C#) - so the Overloads keyword itself could have been omitted but in the end it's just in line with Visual Basic's expressiveness (which some consider overhead) and it was only a language design decision.