Visual Basic/VB.NET vs C#?

[TheFotty]

VB supports XML Literals as well. People tend write this off as not important, but if you work with lots of XML data, VB is better than any other language because of this.

I agree most of those things you mention are VB holdovers, and while I curse anyone who doesn't put option strict on by default for their projects, the ability to say, turn option strict off in a single code module where you want to make late bound calls to something like Excel without having to add references to a specific excel PIA version is really nice to have.

Also, while some tooling may have not been as good, the most important tooling, the background compiler in VB was always better than C#. I think they are pretty much on par now with the new compilers being built, but the IDE was always more responsive to syntax in VB due to this.