dani2, take my advice: switch to Delphi and don't waste your time with VB.NET. Microsoft issues a new version of the Framework every three years and does not care about backward compatibility. The following are two excerpts from a couple of articles which may give you two good reasons to abandon .NET:

Windows Vista will not support older versions of Visual Studio, a move that will require many developers writing applications for the forthcoming operating system to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005, a Microsoft executive said Tuesday.

Developers writing Vista-compatible applications will be unable to use Visual Studio 2002 or Visual Studio 2003 if those are running on top of the new operating system, wrote S. Somasegar, vice president of Microsoft's developer division, in a blog entry.
You can read the entire article on:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/...oupdate_1.html

A recent Evans Data survey shows that the use of Microsoft's Visual Basic among developers is down significantly, but Microsoft says otherwise.

Evans Data, in Santa Cruz, Calif., conducted a study of more than 430 developers in North America and determined that the use of Visual Basic, "one of the most popular computer languages throughout the last 15 years, is eroding dramatically," Evans said in a news release on the issue.
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According to Evans Data's Fall 2006 North American Development Survey, overall, developer use of the Visual Basic family has dropped off by 35 percent since last spring.

Moreover, Evans said, "As expected, developers are finally leaving VB6 and earlier versions; they're also leaving VB.NET; which is down by 26 percent. This means Java now holds the market penetration lead at 45 percent, followed by C/C++ at 40 percent, and C# at 32 percent."
You can read the entire article on:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2065392,00.asp

Delphi will allow you to develop standalone applications and will also enable you to write .NET programs using exactly the same code.