>> But I did attend a presentation on VS 2005 several months ago. The presenter made perfect sense to me when he discussed how the requirements for VS 2003 were to create a stable product, with not too much room for creativity. And that for VS 2005 the 2 teams were presented with a list of requirements for the next release. And each team could come up with their own enhancements beyound that list.

He then went on to show some of the different features that were added to each language. I would expect the differences to become more significant as time goes on. <<

Interesting. Was the presenter from Microsoft? If so, so much for the decision between VB.NET or C#.NET (or whatever other flavor) being just a "lifestyle choice." That is actually one of the things I like about .NET -- code in whatever language you are most comfortable with and pay no performance price because it all generates the same runtime code. To me that was when VB became a fully respectable programming language. Not that it wasn't "respectable" before but it was always recognized that you were paying a performance penalty in return for ease of use. (Plus VB developers had to answer the occasional snide question about what the B in BASIC stands for ;-) ).

Mike