I have been using VB.NET since its beta release a few
years ago.  I was blown away by its debugging
capabilities.  The ability to drill down into the member
variables of an object in the watch window was
priceless.  This feature was not available in VB6.  It
was a great way to browse an object without having to
know all the private member variables of an entity.  This
was one of the features that allowed me to accelerate my
namespace knowledge, allowing development to be
productive.

With the release of Visual Studio .NET 2003, Microsoft
decided "by design" to remove this capability completely
from VB.NET.  Instead of giving the user an option to
enable this feature, Microsoft decided all VB.NET
developers did not need it.  I find this attitude
presumptuous.  The other languages available in VS 2003
retained this feature, while VB developers, who got used
to debugging in this fashion, were left high and dry.  
They didn't even remove it cleanly.  The plus sign still
appears in the watch windows making the developer believe
that variable browsing is available, but when you click
the plus sign to expand the object to view the member
variables, the plus sign just disappears.

I find the exclusion of valuable debugging features and
the lack of quality of VS 2003 very troubling.  It seems
that Microsoft has regressed with their latest release of
Visual Studio.  Currently, we have thirteen corporate
developers with Universal subscriptions designing and
deploying distributed applications primarily using
VB.NET.  And now we have found the task of debugging
cumbersome and unproductive.  I hope Microsoft can find a
way to reintroduce this functionality before our
subscriptions are up.  I would hate to have to spend the
next year switching our development platform, because
Microsoft feels the need to spurn the devoted developers
that utilize the tools offered by Microsoft.