Visual Basic.NET

I'd been toying with the idea of looking into Visual Basic again for about the past two months. Last week I found out some disappointing news about the next release of ColdFusion that kind of "pushed" me towards the .NET platform so I picked up a copy of Beginning VB.NET by WROX. I've read about 100 pages so far and it's not to bad for a "Beginning" book. Would be nice if it came with the source code and a trial copy of Visual Studio or Visual Basic all on a CD though. This is the first book, or any reference for that matter, that explained to me in clear terms what the whole .NET thing is about. Java goes by the mantra of "write once, run anywhere" but .NET is trying to extend that mantra to "write in any language, run anywhere". The book makes the comment that Sun is taking a pretty big bite trying to get Java to work on all platforms, but I think Microsoft is doing at least that if not more. Like Java code that compiles down to a intermediary language, "byte code" in this instance, and then runs on in the Java machine on a platform, .NET does something very similar. Regardless of the language you write your program in, VB or C#, it compiles down to a intermediary language, "MSIL" in this instance, and then runs on the .NET framework installed on the computer. This MSIL is designed not only to be platform independent but also processor independent. The only requirement to run a .NET app then is to have the framework installed on the machine. Right now Microsoft has this framework for Windows only, but Miguel de Icaza started the Mono project which is working to create a framework that will run .NET and operates on the Linux and Mac OS platform.