Posted by: Phil Weber, VB MVP
This post applies to Visual Basic .NET 2005 (“Whidbey”)

Gokhan Altinoren asks:

What was the design decision behind the fact that VB.NET does not support operator overloading? Will this feature be in the VB.NET specification in the future?

Sadly, the VB team failed to consult me while they were designing the language, so I can't comment on why they decided not to support operator overloading in VB.NET (although if I had to guess, I'd wager that it was on the list of “nice-to-have” features that had to be postponed in order to ship VB.NET during the Bush administration).

The good news is that it is slated for the next release of VB (Visual Basic .NET 2005, code-named Whidbey). For more information, see:

http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/cambecc/permalink.aspx/5de5a161-9150-4237-a751-127195cceeab
http://weblogs.asp.net/cfranklin/archive/2003/11/14/37580.aspx