VB.NET has been out on the market since February of 2002, along with associated environments in the Visual Studio family. More than two years later, who's actually adopted VB.NET? And who's decided not to get on board this particular train?

Interviews suggest that the fullest migrators tend to be long-time Windows developers with a need to keep up with all of the latest bells-and-whistles. Meanwhile, some developers plan to forego .NET entirely. In between these two extremes, other programmers dabble with .NET, although they rely mostly on other tools for their day-to-day development. As might be expected, VB.NET adopters generally have long histories with Visual Basic, anyway.

Lance Keene is one veteran VB developer who's already mastered VB.NET. Keene thinks that his .NET skills are paying off in spades.

“One of my customers, for instance, wanted to convert his applications from VB 6 to .NET in order to move from a desktop to a Web environment. The customer was working with another developer before, but the other guy wasn't that familiar with ASP.NET. So that's why I was hired for the job,” says Keene, who is president of Massachusetts-based Keene Systems, Inc.

Keene perceives a number of advantages to VB.NET, too, in addition to its support for the latest features in SQL Server and ASP.NET. “VB.NET provides better controls, smoother editing, improved ways of viewing variables, and much faster application deployment,” he elaborates.

VB.NET dabblers and naysayers, on the other hand, point to barriers ranging from the .NET learning curve to overall costs of application deployment and maintenance. One casual experimenter in VB.NET, Leon di Cruz, still depends largely on VB 6 in his work as a research scientist at the UK's National Institute for Medical Research (NIMH).

Why is di Cruz biding his time over VB.NET? “Syntax is the main reason. VB.NET has some new commands that I'll have to learn,'” according to the researcher.

“VB.NET does offer some new features that I'm sure can be beneficial,” he admits. “For example, it's easier with VB.NET to create forms that let others input their data over a LAN or the Internet. For computer professionals, however, it might be more important to migrate right away [rather] than for academics such as myself,” he notes.

Professional developers, though, are actually divided over VB.NET. For example, David A. Crowell, Jr. claims to be proficient with both VB.NET and C#. Crowell came to VB.NET by way of earlier editions of VB. “I still use VB 5 to write some shareware programs,” Crowell points out.

“I'm more comfortable, though, with C#,” he adds. In this case, there's one reason which is rather self-evident. Crowell gets more practice with C#, since that's the programming environment mainly in place at Doe Anderson, the Louisville, KY-based ad agency where he is a senior Web developer.

At the ad agency, Crowell has debugged and added new functionality to existing ASP.NET apps written in both C# and VB.NET. He's also created class libraries in C# for an ASP.NET data access layer, for instance. In a previous job, the developer “cut his teeth on Delphi.”

Yet some pro developers aren't interested at all in .NET. One big factor is the price of admission, according to Marty Connor, a developer and networking consultant in Cambridge, MA. “Beyond the price of the software, there are 'hidden costs,'” according to Connor. “Hidden costs” cited by some developers include time spent on patch management for the emerging software environment.

Thomas Cerul, an independent developer in Albany, NY, has decided not to step to .NET unless a situation comes up that gives him no other choice.

Cerul, who is experienced with VB 6, agrees with Connor about .NET costs. “I can't see how it'd help me to know VB.NET. Unless you're really a big Microsoft fan, it gets expensive to keep up with all the new releases,” he contends.

“Microsoft keeps claiming that VB.NET will be the most popular environment ever. But nobody can really predict what will gain popularity with developers,” according to Cerul.

What if one of Cerul's customers happened to demand VB.NET? “First of all, I'd wonder why VB.NET was such a huge requirement. So I'd take that question to the customer. But if VB.NET did turn out to be an absolute necessity? Yeah, I'd probably end up learning VB.NET,” he says.

For his part, Keene acknowledges that VB.NET isn't necessarily all that simple to grasp. “Once you've gotten the hang of it, however, .NET really does make your job a whole lot easier,” he allows.

Keene predicts that the .NET learning curve will be steeper for both VB and C++ programmers than for C# pros. “.NET is really 'C# under the covers,' anyway,” the consultant observes. Yet transitioning to .NET can be particularly valuable to VB developers, he says. “VB has always been a bit `behind the curve,'” according to Keene.

So once again, are developers taking the plunge into VB.NET? Depending on who you ask, the answer is “yes,” “no,” or maybe “just a little.” Essentially, it's all about the individual developer.