VS Development Language Preference for ArcObjects Development for deskspatial viewer

[JamesFox1]

My organization is looking to bring an ESRI developer on-board in the next few months to build us a re-vamped event driven desktop based spatial viewer for our geodatabases. We are probably looking an MXD hosted on an ArcGIS server with our GIS styles and viewer application functionality.  

I know ESRI has been hyping the javascript API in the last year, we are probably looking at a Microsoft Visual Studio based solution (VS 2010 for a ArcServer 10.1 and SDE) Our previous developer built our previous viewer in VB.NET but we are curious if there is a preference to using VB vs. C# from an ESRI perspective for building the viewer app. VB may be simpler to work with but C# may have more functionality and libraries at it's doisposal. My first guess would be both are equally fine but we may need to narrow this down for getting the best skillset for finding our developer as well as being able to build the most otimal ArcGIS server based viewer.

-Jim

[RichardWatson]

One thought is to try and standardize on a single language for your organization.  That way your developers can more easily move across projects.

VB is easier to learn, transitions from VB6 and VBA well, and does a lot of things automatically for you (I would say that it emphasizes rapid programming over correctness).  C# is a bit tougher to learn, does not transition from VB6 and VBA well, emphasizes correctness, and you will tend to find more examples/samples in this language than VB.NET.

With minor exceptions, you won't find that an API works in one language but not another.  The ESRI APIs have no preference.