About Visual Basic asked experts at the VSLive Conference in Chicago about VB, .NET, and everything. Here are the answers!

1. What are you doing for the Visual Basic programmer?
2. Given the changes implied by C# and .NET, what is the future of VB?
3. If a company or a programmer is heavily invested into VB 6, what should they be doing now?
4. What is the single most important innovation in VB .NET and why?
5. Java (that is, JVM) versus .NET (that is, CLR) ... Which technology will 'win' ?

What are you doing for the Visual Basic programmer?

Dan Appleman, founder of Desaware, co-founder of APress, author and all-around Guru was a a real treat to talk to at VSLive. Dan is known for his outspoken and independent points of view.

Dan said that if he could boil down his overall efforts into one phrase, it would be to supply VB programmers with, "The things they need, but don't realize that they need." (Note ... Dan's groundbreaking book, VB Programmer's Guide to the Win32 API is a great example. See my article about API's for more details.) Dan pointed out that Desaware was creating a new utility called CAS/Tester to help VB Programmers find out if their code will run in the more unpredictable and complex world of .NET security configuration (code access security). Also, a new ebook called Hijacking .NET was just published. In the spirit of his API book, it demonstrates how to call into unpublished Microsoft .NET code functions.

When I interviewed Keith Franklin, President and Chief Software Architect at Empowered Software Solutions, I found an emphatic supporter of VB .NET.

Keith noted that his company was a leader in providing training and consulting services to VB programmers and he personally spent a lot of his time in technical presentations such as VSLive for programmers.

Keith invites your comments at keith.franklin@empowered.com.

Ken actually does provide a lot of direct help to VB programmers by providing support in the forums at windowsforms.com as often as he can. He also writes articles, presents at conferences, writes and records courseware for AppDev and he answers a ton of questions via email. Finally, he's involved with several planning groups at Microsoft so people who complain to him generally get their complaints passed on up. (His email might be a good one to tuck away in your favorites!) He says this makes it really hard to get any real work done? I can believe it!

Ken can be reached at keng@mcwtech.com.

Solution Partners, Inc. was represented at VSLive by Senior Consultant John Henning.

John said he and his company were helping VB developers with consulting and training and a free menu control downloadable from their web site. John invites everyone to try their "Tech Corner" page.

John invites your comments at jhenning@solpart.com.

Billy Hollis co-authored the first book about ever published on Visual Basic .NET. It was based on beta versions of the software at the time. He's a frequent speaker and author - almost always about .NET related topics these days - and he works out of his own consulting company, Elysian Consulting. He's also the Microsoft Regional Director for Tennessee.

Billy answers email (He really does!) at bhollis@dotnetmasters.com.

You can send email to Chris at ckinsman@vergentsoftware.com.