>>Who has a really good feeling for the release of .NET? We want to incorporate it into a technology plan...
>After reviewing the following and working with the beta, I'm not as excited anymore.

Thats Karl Peterson's lovely contribution, which got him in a little trouble I think. Anyways, you're right, its supposed to be like learning a new language, so my advice (as a non-VBer) may be to look at C# more than VB.NET. C# supposeldy the most stable product in VS.NET right now (well, we know its actually VFP, but I know what they were going for) and also "very elegant".

In any case, good luck with all things .NET... we need it!