It looked like it should have had all the makings of a battle royal. A raucous Boston VB party, perhapsMicrosoft, which had displeased many Visual Basic loyalists when it released its Visual Basic .Net upgrade, was offering a session at TechEd on Tuesday afternoon entitled, “Visual Basic: Today and Tomorrow.”Remembering an online petition last year and much griping about the migration path from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .Net, I figured there would be much protesting at this session. (One objector in 2005 even told me the migration was akin to my being suddenly asked to write InfoWorld in French.) But the session turned out to be a very quiet technical briefing, with some demos of current and upcoming features of Visual Basic. Based on this session, it seems like Microsoft is off the hook. Or maybe the crowd just did not present a large enough sampling of Visual Basic users. Who knows? Microsoft’s Steven Lees, group product manager for Visual Basic, said the company still is seeking to boost interoperability between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .Net. “We’re not really doing any product upgrades [to Visual Basic 6]. We’re doing some work in VB.Net to make sort of an interop scenario work better,” Lees said. “When we go to talk to folks, there’s still tons of VB6 code out there. We still want people to have a good experience running that. That’s why we’re actually still continuing to try to make [the] upgrade path smooth,” Lees said. The current Visual Basic technology makes it easier to write the kind of data-centric applications being written today, said Lees. One key improvement eyed for Visual Basic in the planned “Orcas” release of the Visual Studio toolset is a leveraging of Microsoft’s LINQ (Language-Integrated Query) technology. “What LINQ does is it gives me this sort of natural query syntax,” Lees said. Enhanced XML support also is anticipated. Now, will I hear from lots of Visual Basic users not as quiet about the migration as the ones at TechEd on Tuesday? Software Development