These are a few notes that I took from the MSDN Chat about "Visual Basic .NET Language Design". The statements are rephrased answers from the VB.NET team.

• The upcoming release will be the most thoroughly documented version yet, and the information will be the easiest to find.
• Samples are the area that is expanded the most. In addition to having a large number of fairly extensive samples, a series of short, task-based code sample topics will be introduced, and the sample code for the .NET members will be updated.
• (Freely interpreted) Documentation (or samples) will be updated to better demonstrate how individual components can fit together in a solution.
• The VB procedural library (Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll) will remain mandatory for supporting several VB-specific methods (e.g. "Like"). The reason for this is the VB runtime functions often provide a simpler and more comprehensible way to find functionality. The VB.NET team is even looking to expand them in "new and interesting directions". It is possible that the VB.NET helper functions will be split up into different assemblies to enable developers that don't want/need backwards compatibility with VB6 functions to remove these backwards compatibility functions.
• The "VB.NET" team is seriously considering implementing a C# "As" counterpart in "a future release".
• Operator overloading will be supported in the next version of VB.NET.
• C# 's XML Comments will initially be preceded by @ in VB.NET. They are also still considering " ''' " (3 apostrophes) or " /// " (like C#). No final decision has been made. (<grin>One participant suggested to support REMREMREM too...</grin>)

The full transcript of the chat will probably be available soon on the MSDN website.

For those who are interested in VB.NET, subscribe to Paul Vick's weblog. He's a Technical Lead on the Visual Basic .NET product at Microsoft. Duncan Mackenzie has collected a list of VB bloggers on the MSDN Visual Basic Developer Center.

BTW: In case you couldn't imagine this yourself: I like VB.NET and hope we won't see any "last minute changes" like we saw with the first release of Visual Basic .NET. I was really happy with some features that were introduced in the first beta of Visual Basic .NET (like short circuit evaluation) that I was a little disappointed when I read/experienced they were removed or were moved to different keywords (OrElse and AndAlso in case of short circuit evaluation). But such things can happen when you start working with beta software...