title: Are VB.NET Developers Less Curious? Standardizing on VB.NET
body: <p>I'm asking this question as someone who works for a company with a 70% to 75% VB.NET developer community. I would say 80% of those developers do not know what an OOD pattern is. I'm wondering if this is the best thing for the health of my company's development efforts?</p>
  
  <p>I'm looking at the tag counts on:<br>
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/tags">https://stackoverflow.com/tags</a><br>
  There are currently:<br>
  12175 .NET questions<br>
  18630 C# questions<br>
  2067  VB.NET questions  </p>
  
  <p>Checking Amazon, it seems like there are:<br>
  51 C# Wrox books<br>
  21 VB.NET Wrox books  </p>
  
  <p>On CodePlex there are:<br>
  979 Projects tagged C#<br>
  136 Projects tagged VB.NET  </p>
  
  <p>There is definitely less materials to learn from if you wanted to be a VB.NET developer.
  What would be a company's advantage to standardizing on VB.NET and hiring VB.NET developers? How does Microsoft answer this question? </p>
  
  <p>Is the only two arguments:  </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>We had these VB6 programmers and lets make them comfortable  </li>
  <li>XML Literals</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>If you work for a company that has completely standardized on VB.NET, can you post an answer explaining the pragmatic or technical reasons why they made that choice?</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong><br>
  More stats - O'Reilly Radar<br>
  <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-22.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 4 -- The Languages</a></p>