Techrepublic.com has an short and sweet post about the development of new platforms which are leading developers to work in a more abstract manner, in the sense that you need to care about which operating system your application is going to run on.Check out the post at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=693
Gone are the days when you worked on a Visual Basic app and wished that every machine would run Windows because that is the only Operating system your application would run on. The same applies to Visual Basic.NET . Personally i feel that no new development should be started in Visual Basic.NET. If anybody is in absolute love with .NET he could go in for C# as it is more similar to Java which allows you to shift gears more easily between the 2 languages. I myself was a Visual basic programmer few years ago and can tell you that any language where in you are locked into a particular platform is a sheer wastage of your time and effort and should be seriously avoided.