asp.net mvc - Razor View Engine Quirks in VB.NET

Question

I just downloaded the MVC 3.0 RC and I'm excited to start using it, especially the Razor view engine. However, due to a few stick in the mud type people here, we are stuck using VB.NET instead of C#.

When I started trying it out, I noticed some quirks. If you are creating a Razor view using CSHTML, you can write code like this:

@foreach(string genreName in Model.Genres)
{
    <li>@genreName</li>
}

Razor will automatically detect that the <li> text is an HTML tag and will switch out of "code mode". With a VB.NET VBHTML file, this doesn't seem to be working. It's making me put the @: keyword in front of each line like this:

@For Each genreName As String In Model.Genres
    @:<li>@genreName</li>
Next

If I don't have it there, I get a runtime error. Also, the <text></text> tags don't seem to work.

Anybody know what's going on here or whether there's a workaround?

Answer 1

I would say the reason it's required in Vb.net is vb allows xml elements inline whereas c# does not.

Dim xmlMarkup = <someElement>Values</span>

Because of this the natural parser for vb must behave differently than c# so you have to tell the parser to escape back to html by using the @. You can use @ and @:.