Just to be clear, before I was the Ruby guy, I was the VB guy. I owned boxed copies of every version from 1.0 onwards - including VB Dos - and was even the Mini

Just to be clear, before I was the Ruby guy, I was the VB guy. I owned boxed copies of every version from 1.0 onwards - including VB Dos - and was even the Mining Company (later about.com) guide for VB. I was one of the signatories of a petition by over 120 Microsoft MVPs that asked them to maintain a COM branch long enough to release a proper VB7 release that could serve as a viable transition pathway. They told us in no uncertain terms that we were farting into a hurricane. There were initially more VB.NET developers - more of us - than C# developers only because there were millions of casual VB6 developers that had a massive investment in the tools. It's my position that they really fucked up by telling us that our only choice was to get with the program. At least in my case, it was not. I left the VB world and started the first Rails consultancy in the world in fall 2004. This proved to be a rather excellent move. I'm curious about your comment about how all OSS software from the 2002 era was VB.NET. I could be missing something, but... what? :) Do you have any good examples?