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

Our experts were all over the map on this one, mainly because there was so much to like in VB .NET. Again, Dan Appleman summarized the most popular point of view, "VB .NET puts VB programmers on an equal footing with the most advanced object oriented techniques for the first time." To nail down the point, Dan said that a lot of Desaware's commercial programs are now originally written in VB .NET.

In addition to highlighting the object oriented features of VB .NET, several gurus put in a vote for the .NET Framework (even while pointing out that the .NET Framework wasn't exclusive to VB .NET). Ken Getz had this to say, "Most of all, I love the .NET Framework. OK, it's not completely, 100% perfect; nor is it 100% complete. But it's a miracle. It's just impossible for me to fathom that so much work just magically 'popped' out of Microsoft at once. The .NET Framework is this huge, amazing, 'ball of tricks'." Even though he admitted that it might say something about his social life, Ken said, "Every time I get bored, I go poking around looking for some new corner of the Framework that I haven't explored yet, and I can entertain myself for hours."

Hey Ken! We understand. Really we do!

Keith Franklin showed his technical orientation by giving the most specific answer of anyone interviewed, "Attributes and serialization. This gives VB .NET the ability do whatever needs to be done with VB .NET objects." John Henning agreed by pointing out that the elimination of "DLL Hell" in VB .NET was just one example of the benefit of this new environment.

(Technical Note from About Visual Basic: Serialization creates a persistent and portable object that can be stored to disk, or moved across a network. Serialization let's an object be recreated on whatever machine needs it. .NET provides a standard way of serializing and deserializing objects. Basic .NET serialization to XML, SOAP, and binary formats is easy-to-use, because programmers don't have to provide explicit serialization code, but it can be extended with custom serialization if the situation requires it. .NET serialization also captures the object metadata, which means that .NET applications on different platforms - such as Windows and Linux - can exchange and share serialized data in files.)