Joel on .NET. More on the .NET cross-language strategy from Joel Spolsky

VB.NET and C#.NET are virtually identical except for tiny syntactic differences. And other languages that want to be part of the .NET world need to support at least a core set of features and types or they won't be able to Play Well With Others. But how do I develop a UNIX command line utility in .NET? How do I develop a tiny Windows EXE in less than 16K in .NET?

It seems like .NET gives us a "choice" of languages precisely where we couldn't care less about it -- in the syntax.