According to Karl E. Peterson, VisualBasic.NET is a bastardized version of the real VB.

Frankly, I think the real VB the biggest, baddest bag of dead-ends, half-working-concepts and workaround-hell that ever existed, but it can't be good for VB developers if they're going to have to rewrite everything.

Or perhaps, MS is trying to rid themselves of the crappy side of VB and start anew. If so, amen. If not, it doesn't surprise me, because each new version of VB has given developers a number of new language constructs that on the surface you'd think would help but the implementation has been so bad that it's just made things more and more frustrating.