I don’t usually just link to other entries, but sometimes people just say thing that I’ve been meaning to say but just never found the right words for. Scott’s entry on the joys of VB, .NET style, express pretty well the answer to the question of “why VB in .NET?” And I particularly liked Paul Kimmel’s article “Has Visual Basic Lost Its Way?” As I’ve said many times, so much of the past two releases (and the upcoming one) has been just about getting VB onto .NET, which has been a huge endeavor. Not to mention being, for the most part, almost purely reactive – a lot of our feature plans have been driven by the features that show up in the CLR. Part of the angst about VB is that people tend to look at that and extrapolate more of the same: more reactivity. But the point is that with the release of Whidbey, VB will finally be fully caught up in terms of supporting .NET. Which means that we can now look ahead to ways in which we can make “the next big thing” happen on .NET. Stay tuned…