Visual Studio Next Generation: Language Enhancements

Today the Visual Basic language is very liberal in the implicit type coercions that it will generate. For assignment and for parameter passing other than by reference, the Visual Basic compiler will allow nearly any data type to be converted to any other type by generating runtime coercion. The runtime coercion operation will fail if the value that is to be converted cannot be converted without data loss. Through the addition of a new compilation option, Visual Basic can generate compile-time errors for any conversions that may cause an error at runtime. Option Strict improves type safety by generating errors when a conversion is required which could fail at runtime or which, like the automatic conversion between numeric types and strings, is unexpected by the user.