The "document" might perhaps be how some VB programmers conceived of their code - as a totality not just a collection of code lines delivering an algorithm - but perhaps you are right and this is not an idea that you can take very far.
I am not sure that I agree that VB.NET was "completely different" - different yes, but still clearly a dialect of Basic (of which there have been many - and some new ones popping up all the time). I suspect that you overstate the difficulty in migrating from one dialect to another - sure it is going to take time to reach similar levels of productivity but time and languages move on - it's something that programmers above all should be glad to embrace.
On your final point - ASP.NET does not in fact require the Visual Studio IDE. There are many advantages to be gained from the IDE but it is not a requirement and there are many texts around that demonstrate development outside of VS. OK VBScript was coming to the end of it's life but in any case it's client side (browser) utility was very limited and something more powerful was certainly needed server side. Oddly - the next generation of VB.NET will include a dynamic option - son of VBScript perhaps?
The "document" might perhaps be how some VB programmers conceived of their code - as a totality not just a collection of code lines delivering an algorithm - but perhaps you are right and this is not an idea that you can take very far.
I am not sure that I agree that VB.NET was "completely different" - different yes, but still clearly a dialect of Basic (of which there have been many - and some new ones popping up all the time). I suspect that you overstate the difficulty in migrating from one dialect to another - sure it is going to take time to reach similar levels of productivity but time and languages move on - it's something that programmers above all should be glad to embrace.
On your final point - ASP.NET does not in fact require the Visual Studio IDE. There are many advantages to be gained from the IDE but it is not a requirement and there are many texts around that demonstrate development outside of VS. OK VBScript was coming to the end of it's life but in any case it's client side (browser) utility was very limited and something more powerful was certainly needed server side. Oddly - the next generation of VB.NET will include a dynamic option - son of VBScript perhaps?