A lot of people have opined that VB.NET and C# are in many ways the "same language", just with different syntax. If you were to take a chess board and change it from black and white to red and blue and you renamed all the pieces, but didn't change the more fundamental rules about the ways the pieces moved, the new game would in a very real sense be "the same game as chess," right? Whether VB.NET and C# really are in that sense mere syntactic variations on each other is a debatable point -- I think it is not nearly so cut-and-dried as some people think. There are a lot of reasons I think that, and I don't want to go into all of them today. One of the most interesting and important to me though is the most ineffable -- the "spirit" of a language in many ways both transcends its syntax and suffuses some small decisions in interesting ways.