You resurrected a 13 year old thread. That's a solid chit-chat move.

It's kind of interesting to read what people were saying about JS that far back. It's become so much better adopted and used, by now, but it was not back then.

You don't need VS to write .NET and you never did. There was some talk of replacing VBA with .NET a few years back (like maybe 10, perhaps), but not so much anymore.