To its credit, Microsoft is making a very early release of the Visual Studio. NET beta, includes the new Visual Basic. NET, freely available to developers. It even offers an upgrade tool that translates Visual Basic 6.0 code into Visual Basic. NET, although the tool does not work with earlier versions.
NET are too similar.
The debate about the .NET languages in many respects echoes the debate about .NET Framework and the .Net initiative in general. There are some familiar pluses and minuses. Microsoft's thoroughly object-oriented set of languages enforce a single line of inheritance, variable initialization, bounds safety, and unified type, threading, and exception models. With the Common Language Specification, programming languages that adhere to that specification get the benefits of the .NET languages listed above, can be used in Visual Studio, and have a greatly simplified cross-language calling sequences in Windows OS client and server environs. NET, the critical part of .NET Framework, will probably not be delivered until somewhere between September and November of 2001.