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"Depends on what you're looking for, VB.NET is much more internet savy, and more compatible with external protocols/languages. The tools and 3rd party add ons will eventually mature, it's not as long in the tooth as VB, and more complex to integrate additional features."

VB.Net is fine for a new firm, or for an individual programmer. On the other hand, VB.Net is a disaster for firms with large existing bases of VB 6 (or VB 5) code.

If you are writing everything from scratch, then VB.Net is fine (presuming that you don't need to interact very much with major VBA applications such as MS Word, MS Excel, MS Access, Autocad, etc.)...but if you want to leverage programming work that you paid for some years ago, forget it.

If it couldn't be done, MicroSoft would happily sell the rights and code to their VB 6 engine.

I see now past history of that, for any product, do you? Sounds like an incorrect assumption.

VB.Net is fine for a new firm, or for an individual programmer. On the other hand, VB.Net is a disaster for firms with large existing bases of VB 6 (or VB 5) code.

Not the case in my shop. Granted, I run the network side of the house, but our best developers (out of a dev team of about 45) were raving about .NET before it even was available, based on advance info they got at DevCon. We were running the beta copy on quite a few systems (which I had the right to gripe about, as we knew in advance we'd have to completely wipe those systems when the gold release came out in just a few months), but I gave in because I never saw anyone so excited about anything.

Granted, most of our apps were MTS/COM/COM+ and not desktop variety, but they claimed the amount of code in many cases was reduced from several pages to like 4 lines.

Now, they're already clamoring for the new VS 2005, I don't have time to know all the reasons why, but most everything they do now is VB.NET. Me? I still use HTML, Java, and some Perl, LOL.