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

For the most part, our experts disagreed with the question. For example, Chris Kinsman said, "Who knows and who cares? They each have their strong points. The existence of the JVM actually in some respects validates the CLR approach." Ken Getz added, "I'm not going there. I have to believe .NET/CLR will 'win', but why does one have to?"

But even though there was a strong sentiment that the CLR might 'win', most thought that both would continue to slug it out in the market for quite some time. Even though Keith Franklin was one of the strongest advocates of VB .NET, Keith admitted that he could not forsee a day when one would knock the other out of the ring.

But guru John Henning was willing to make a clear choice. He said it would be "no contest" and .NET would become the standard because they have now "one upped" JVM. Further, John thought that the Java community was too fragmented. John also volunteered that in an Internet based development world, it really didn't matter as much since server based applications don't care what the client is written in and "fat clients" are a thing of the past.

Billy Hollis was even willing to bet on it. "I think the CLR/.NET Framework will be dominant. I have a bet I made with someone over a year ago that .NET will have a 2-to-1 market share over Java by 2005, and I'm feeling pretty good about my chances of winning it."

I wonder if Billy has set up a server that accepts payments through Microsoft's Secure Electronic Transactions Framework?

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Well ... There you have it! The present and future of VB .NET through the eyes of a panel of experts at VSLive in Chicago. VSLive continues to be the most important independent forum for Visual Basic and Visual Studio programmers and it held internationally several times a year. Check the VSLive web site to see if you can put it on your schedule and maybe I'll see you there!

(Note ... the interviews here were each conducted at a different time and place and later composed into a composite article.)