Thanks Gabriele. This letter from Microsoft is two weeks old, but I think it best represents the changes Microsoft has made recently in VB.Net in response to developer's requests. The letter is from Ari Bixhorn Product Manager, Visual Basic. Here is a clip:

I wanted to clear some of the confusion surrounding recent posts and articles that discuss changes back to the VB.NET language. We've spent the past month or so reviewing the changes we made to Visual Basic.NET to ensure that we are shipping a version of VB that would provide power and cross-language interop as well as familiarity with VB6. We reviewed change requests from Visual Basic programmers around the world and while we reaffirmed many of the changes that we decided upon more than a year and a half ago, there were several changes - reverting to VB6 semantics - that we felt would really help ease the transition from VB6.

Behavior of And/Or/Not/XOr - The functionality of these operators will be returned to bitwise operations instead of purely logical (meaning they will work as they always have in VB). As a result, there is no need to keep the BitAnd, BitOr, and BitNot operators that were planned for VB.NET. In addition, the operator precedence will be restored to these operators as it was in Visual Basic 6. Finally, these operators will not short-circuit. Instead, to enable developers to show explicit intent in their code, we will introduce two new operators, "AndAlso" and "OrElse" that will provide short-circuiting behavior. This request was consistent with our initial usability findings on short-circuiting "And" and "Or," which resulted in bugs that were hard for VB devs to track down. Again, these changes provide consistency with VB6 without sacrificing functionality in VB.NET.