Visual Basic

Visual Basic 2005 (VB 8.0)
Visual Basic 2005 is the name used to refer to the update to Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft having decided to drop the .NET portion of the title.
For this release, Microsoft added many features, including:
Edit and Continue
Design-time expression evaluation
The My pseudo-namespace (overview, details), which provides:
easy access to certain areas of the .NET Framework that otherwise require significant code to access
dynamically-generated classes (notably My.Forms)
Improvements to the VB-to-VB.NET converter [2]
The Using keyword, simplifying the use of objects that require the Dispose pattern to free resources
Just My Code, which hides boilerplate code written by the Visual Studio .NET IDE
Data Source binding, easing database client/server development
The above functions (particularly My) are intended to reinforce Visual Basic .NET's focus as a rapid application development platform and further differentiate it from C#.
Visual Basic 2005 introduced features meant to fill in the gaps between itself and other "more powerful" .NET languages, adding:
.NET 2.0 languages features such as:
generics [3]
Partial classes, a method of defining some parts of a class in one file and then adding more definitions later; particularly useful for integrating user code with auto-generated code
Nullable Types
XML comments that can be processed by tools like NDoc to produce "automatic" documentation
Operator overloading [4]
Support for unsigned integer data types commonly used in other languages