NET has turned out to be far more robust and carefully planned than I expected. In fact, it's so robust that it bears little resemblance to Visual Basic 6 at all. Upon querying real-life Visual Basic 6 developers who are also keeping an eye on the .NET embryo, this opinion was verified in a somewhat bellicose manner. Seems like many Visual Basic 6 developers are a bit turned off not just by new features, but by core differences between the two environments as well. While there are numerous tangible differences between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic.
NET can be dangerous.
Where Visual Basic 6 took great pains to keep mediocre programmers from hurting themselves or their users, Visual Basic. NET drops much of the protective padding and leaves it up to you not to hurt yourself. Along with new logic and a new runtime, for example, Visual Basic. NET adds the ability to easily employ threading. But it's up to you not to use it in such a way as to blow up your application one fine day.