I get this question a lot, and I explain many of the same things that Paul goes through in this post, so I’d love it if more people would read this material:

The "native" .NET language? _In the comments on my _[_post on language choice_](http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2004/05/28/1085.aspx)_, Patrick asked β€œisn't C# the language that's most 'native' to the .NET environment?” Christopher then follows up with a related question as to whether developers should use functions in the System namespace instead of ones in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace because the former might be faster. We see these kinds of questions fairly often, so it's worth discussing them a little bit._
[Read the whole post for the rest of his comments](http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2004/05/31/1100.aspx)
Some related material on MSDN:
[Visual Basic .NET Internals](http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vbtchmicrosoftvisualbasicnetinternals.asp) (by Derek Hatchard and [Scott Swigart](http://ea.3leaf.com/))