Missing compiler features from VB.NET

Having spent probably more time in the last couple of months on a project using VB.NET than I might otherwise have chosen, it seems to me that the same problems keep cropping up again and again that you’d really expect a modern compiler to help you deal with.

I’ve lost track of the amount of time we’ve spent looking for the source of a problem that turned out to be where someone forgot to actually return the result of a computation at the end of a method, or worse where one of the code paths forgot to return a result but all the others did. The C# compiler wouldn’t waste any time telling me I’d done something wrong and I don’t understand how the compiler for a language historically targeted at an audience that might appreciate a bit more hand-holding can happily continue churning out the code.