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has an impressive wiki, but no where does it actually say what it is to be used for.

I most often see this tag used in conjunction with one of the .Net languages or in lieu of one. It doesn't seem to serve a purpose at all, because we all know that , , and all run on top of the .Net framework. The tag adds no value or information in this way.

The only legitimate reason I can think of to use the tag, would be for questions containing code from the recently open sourced framework itself. Perhaps someone wants to get their code reviewed here before submitting a pull request to the repository. I would think that will be an exceedingly rare occasion though.

So, am I missing something? Is there a legitimate reason for this tag to exist? If so, how should we be using it and what (if anything) should we do about cleaning up the tag?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Is it impossible to write code in those languages without using the .NET framework? \$\endgroup\$
    – Simon Forsberg
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 14:17
  • \$\begingroup\$ @SimonAndréForsberg afaik yes. They all compile to the same intermediate language that basically is the framework. \$\endgroup\$
    – RubberDuck
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 14:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ It's interesting that you waited until now for this question. How should Objective-C.NET questions be tagged? [objective-c.net] or [objective-c][.net] or something else? \$\endgroup\$
    – nhgrif
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 18:08
  • \$\begingroup\$ @nhgrif it wasn't intentional that I waited until now, but I think it's a good time to discuss it. \$\endgroup\$
    – RubberDuck
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 18:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ @nhgrif What's "Objective-C.NET"? If you're talking about the newly announced support for Objective-C in VS, I believe that doesn't have anything to do with .Net. \$\endgroup\$
    – svick
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 19:03
  • \$\begingroup\$ Well it's definitely a different flavor of Objective-C. I don't know for certain whether or not it's using the .NET framework (I don't know what else it would use though), but it's definitely not using the same frameworks that I'd use developing an OS X or iOS app with Objective-C. \$\endgroup\$
    – nhgrif
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 19:06
  • \$\begingroup\$ @SimonAndréForsberg Technically? No. \$\endgroup\$
    – nhgrif
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 20:16

1 Answer 1

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For the language tags you mention, the tag might be unnecessary or redundant (most of the time). In fact, the tag already has the built into its tag. The actual language is called BASIC. Microsoft's version of BASIC is called Visual BASIC (like they also have Visual C++ and Visual C and on and on and on... they're big fans of that word).

However, let's keep in mind that there are other languages outside of the three mentioned in the question.

You can write C++ code for the .NET framework, so a question could very rightfully be tagged .

You can also now apparently write Objective-C code for the .NET framework. Why you would want to do that is another question, but the fact remains that is seems you can, so at some point in the near future, someone might want to tag a question as .

If we eliminate or blacklist this flag, then we'll start seeing tags like:

And the main problem with this is that the actual language will be similar enough between the two frameworks that we shouldn't cause language experts to miss a question because it was tagged as rather than .

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  • \$\begingroup\$ "You can write C++ code for the .NET framework" Only if you use a dialect of C++, which already has a tag on CR: c++-cli. \$\endgroup\$
    – svick
    Commented May 3, 2015 at 13:57
  • \$\begingroup\$ @svick And I'm recommending against a special tag for Objective-C (or any other future language Microsoft chooses to bring under the .NET umbrella. If it isn't too much of a hassle, I'd recommend that the C++-CLI tag be eliminated as well in place of tagging questions as [c++][.net] \$\endgroup\$
    – nhgrif
    Commented May 3, 2015 at 13:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ Note that it's Visual Basic[.NET], not Visual BASIC. They stripped out all-caps when they moved away from QBASIC. \$\endgroup\$
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Commented May 10, 2015 at 21:51

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