Visual Basic.NET was the product/marketing name for VisualBasicSeven (a.k.a. VB7). 
Despite Microsoft's dropping of the .NET moniker with VisualBasicEight, the community often uses the term VisualBasicDotNet to refer to all versions of VisualBasic that target the CommonLanguageRuntime.

The presence of the .NET moniker was due to the rampant use of the .NET brand across Microsoft (recall that Windows Server 2003 was named Windows Server .NET up until months before its release).
* VisualBasicSeven was the first VisualBasic integrated with the DotNet platform.
* VisualBasicEight dropped the .NET moniker (and added support for generics). 
* VisualBasicNine still eshews the .NET suffix and adds support for LINQ and native XML.
----

VisualBasicDotNet did not mean the instant death of previous versions of VisualBasic (IE: VbClassic).
''It looks pretty good though.''

Some have characterized VisualBasicDotNet as a feeble response by MicroSoft to appease the world's largest developer community (larger than CobolLanguage anyway), who felt betrayed by the introduction of the new CsharpLanguage that came with MicrosoftDotNet. 

The CsharpLanguage is the most popular MicrosoftDotNet language. ''(See http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm)''
* ''Tiobe doesn't measure intranet usage. And why is "BASIC" almost as popular as C#? BASIC for the Internet? I've never seen anybody use BASIC for internet projects. Are they miscounting "Visual Basic", or perhaps classic ASP (VBS)?''
* {I doubt anyone is searching their local intranet for information on "skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors", which is what the TIOBE index searches for on Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, etc.  Though it's not made clear, adding up the scores for Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET suggests that "Basic" is the collective category for VbClassic + VB.NET + VBA + "Basic language", etc.}
* They already have a category for "Visual Basic.Net" such that lumping that into "BASIC" doesn't make sense from a reader standpoint. Ideally they should be mutually-exclusively split into 1) "VB.Net", 2) "VBA & VBS" (VBS = VB-Script & ASP classic), 3) VB-desktop-classic, 4) "BASIC, non-MS". (Perhaps spitting out VBA & VBS).

Despite many complaints, as at early 2004 it is reported to have a much better debugging support than the CsharpLanguage. This will be enhanced in the 2005 version, whilst the CsharpLanguage will have better support for features such as refactoring. VB.NET has extra features such as a very large "snippet" library, which the CsharpLanguage seems to lack.

It appears as veteran VisualBasic developers went to bigger and better things like VB.NET, some vacancies in VbClassic were created and backfilled by surplus mainframe developers like this annoying MicrosoftSlave guy :)

With the arrival of version 1.1 of DotNet in 2003, there is better support for development of applications to be used on mobile platforms. The relevant part is called DotNetCompactFramework.

----
On VisualBasicNine:
* http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/future/
* LanguageIntegratedQueryProject (LINQ)
* http://www.dotnetslackers.com/SQL/re-19768_NEW_VB_LINQ_CTP_Now_live_on_MSDN.aspx

On VisualBasicEight:
* "Defining and Using Generics in Visual Basic 2005" at http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/66786/thunderbird-10-email-client-bids-to-repeat-firefox-success.html
* "Favorable review of Harold Davis VB.NET programming book" at http://visualbasic.about.com/od/vbbooks/l/bldavis1_1a.htm

----

See also:
* ThingsWeLoveAboutVisualBasicDotNet and ThingsWeHateAboutVisualBasicDotNet
----
CategoryDotNet CategoryVisualBasic