Eli Bendersky's website When you look at a programming language/methodology/framework and it seems "warm, nice and fuzzy" it's usually a good sign.
I've been digging a little in .NET 2003 Studio in the past couple of days, and it looks like a truly great environment. The design of their CLR is clean and consistent over several programming languages. Many old things were rewritten and allow easier coding. It really looks like a great and very rapid tool for Windows development. In VB 6 it was also possible to throw a reasonable applications with a GUI very quickly, but in VB.NET (and C#.NET) it looks cleaner, better thought out and generally more consistent.
One big disatvantage is distribution. If the person next to me has no .NET runtime installed on his PC, I must copy a 20 MB pack to him in order to make any application work, and this sucks...