I've been working with VB for about a year or two now. .NET came out about around the same time as the whole Microsoft VS. Java thing... Basicly its nothing more than a MS's replacement for Java. Many of my fellow VBers are turned off by .NET because it's less user friendly as VB but VB was never really a network friendly language....

You had to fool around with winsock.ocx and inet properties and functions. I could sit here for hours talking about the ways I've made client and server software speak to each other and the responses I'd get out of it! .Net is basicly Java/sql kinda stuff only with little bits and pieces of VB santax.