I apologize if this has already been explained elsewhere.  I am evaluating DNN to use as the foundation of the next generation of our web applications.

We've been using .Net since 1.0 and just this year released a 3 year from-the-ground up rewrite of our main ASP.Net application (35,000 Members, 3,000 concurrent active users at peak) using SQL 2005 and ASP.Net 2.0 - started when 2.0 was Beta 1.  We used Enterprise Library 1.1 (ported to the 2.0 framework) as our foundational framework.  So we do have a great deal of expirience and knowledge about enterprise web applications and .Net in general.  We are also a VB.Net shop and proud of it!  Hopefully I'll avoid some flaming by getting that out of the way.

DNN seems like just an amazing app and I've been excitied with each new cool feature I discover.  However, while purusing web.config I was surprised to see that Option Strict is not enabled.  By enabling Option Strict, VB.Net becomes the equal of C# in raw performance on various operations.  Plus it helps to enforce tight code discipline.

Performance Tips and Tricks in .NET Applications

Option Explicit and Option Strict in Visual Basic .NET or in Visual Basic 2005

CompilationSection.Strict Property

VB vs. C# MSIL Code Generation: Are the results equal?

As a long-time developer I'm well aware of the compromises that must be made and choices that are hard to reverse, so my intent here is not to knock DNN in the slightest.

I'm just curious as to the reasoning behind this decision and if there are plans to enable Option Strict in the future?

Thanks!

This can also be enabled in project properties as well as in the options for Visual Studio, instead of including it on every code page.

Unfortunately, it defaults to off.

As bill mentioned I too believe that turning it on would break a large number of third pary modules and my guess is that is one of the reasons that it is not on.  Also, I do believe there are some core pieces that would not function either.

I personally would hope that the core team would move to allowing it to be set, but I can also see many circumstances where it might not be possible.