Upgrading to .NET

[Campion]

So I've been pondering upgrading to .NET 2005 (or 2008) personal edition
from VB6 Pro, since I'll need to learn it eventually. Anyhow, I was wondering what differences (besides the code base) lay between the two, and what kind of functionality will I lose (or gain) from upgrading to .NET 2005 or 2008 personal edition from VB6 pro?

I read somewhere that .NET personal edition only supports local databases. if I use ODBC, would it matter if it's local or remote?

I really don't want to pay the $1,500 for the pro edition with MSDN, or have the limited funcationality of the express edition.

[nmadd]

Hi there,
You can compare the differences between all versions of Visual Studio here and choose which one best suits your needs. Good luck!

[Campion]

Hi there,
You can compare the differences between all versions of Visual Studio

I already did that. What I want to know is what do I gain/lose when going from VB6 Pro to .NET personal. :P

[Hack]

Moved to General Developer

[timeshifter]

.NET makes many operations much easer than VB6. It's a purely object-oriented layout, which immediately makes things available that weren't before. Intellisense is also considerably more useful. Also, I do web development in VB and ASP.NET... I can't even imagine what it would take to do this particular job in VB6, if it's even possible, yet the majority of what I do is not that complicated, thanks to the object-oriented and web-friendly structure of .NET as a whole.