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VB.Net is a counter-productive nightmare...a beast...a cost-adding, time-wasting monster.

As I already said, it depends on what you're using it for. If your building large multi-user enterprise applications, .NET is far superior. If you're building " little tiny test applications that rarely get used by anyone besides the programmer" as you put it, use VB. No one is stopping you, you have the license, and can buy the support. If they eventually kill the support, which being a commercial company they might, if it's no longer profitable, move to something else, or find a 3rd party support vendor. You could also move to a different product, if you want. The sky is definitely not falling.

"As I already said, it depends on what you're using it for. If your building large multi-user enterprise applications, .NET is far superior."

No, VB.Net has an inferior error detection and correction architecture that requires the programmer to code every line she desires to check for an error by hand, rather than the old VB 6 way of identifying a single error handler and turning on automatic error detection that checked at every line for you. VB.Net is also inferior with VBA application integrations (typically the most used applications in many firms, e.g. MS Word, MS Excel).

But worse, VB.Net can't handle *existing* VB 6 multi-user enterprise applications. So your existing multi-user enterprise applications are screwed if you want to upgrade to VB.Net.

Now granted, if you are only now getting around to writing multi-user enterprise applications (i.e. you can write everything new from scratch and have no need to leverage your existing code base), then VB.Net is OK.

Not great. Just OK.

"You could also move to a different product, if you want. The sky is definitely not falling."

I agree.

Corporations that have been burned by MicroSoft's VB.Net trashing of their VB 6 code bases are at least going to consider moving to other products rather than remaining with proprietary MicroSoft "solutions" that may again at some point in the future "lose" backwards compatibility.

No doubt C++ and Java will gain some new adherents from those who leave the VB line.

And MicroSoft is big enough that even VB.Net will probably stumble along without actually falling out of use.

So the sky isn't falling.