I remember it as the push to C#. Microsoft had basically shat themselves about Java, and were pushing C# as its rival. VB.Net was a bit broken, there was lots o

I remember it as the push to C#. Microsoft had basically shat themselves about Java, and were pushing C# as its rival. VB.Net was a bit broken, there was lots of "you'll have to use the C# interface for that because the VB one isn't ready yet". Generally as developers we were pushed to C# and the writing was clearly on the wall that VB wasn't going to continue as is. The whole Microsoft stack was converging on C# and moving away from VB. And the replacement of COM with .Net has an impact. We had a whole ecosystem of COM (and DCOM) objects that worked well. .Net broke all of that, and didn't replace them for years. I don't think it was the move to OOP. VB4 introduced classes way back in '96 (iirc), and by VB6 everything was objects. It was a little more complicated for newbies (I remember training junior devs in OOP in the early '00s), but once they got the hang of classes and instances it was plain sailing.