>I get your point, BTW, but what really happens with that example? I imagine it invokes the VB.NET compiler in some manner during the compile process, but the runtime is the same for C# and VB.NET, right?

My understanding is that it all happens at runtime. Each VB function is a static member (that's shared to you VBers) of the Microsoft.VisualBasic Class so you don't need to instantiate it as an object.

BTW there are Microsoft.Csharp and Microsoft.JScript namespaces too. I think the point is that all namespaces are available to all .NET languages.

-Dave