EA rightfully worried about no refactoring in VB8
Sean or Scott or someone at Early Adopter is rightfully worried that we will not see refactoring support for VB in Whidbey.
The story I heard at PDC was that the lack of refactoring is a direct trade-off with edit & continue. The VB team chose E&C, the C# team chose refactoring. I've sort of been assuming that C# will get E&C next time around and VB will get refactoring. Presumedly the C# team will benefit more from the VB team's E&C work than the VB team will benefit from the C# teams' refactoring work.
I have heard nothing to make me believe that VB refactoring will show up in Visual Studio 2005 on par with C#, but I'll still wait with bated breath because the majority of the code I've written in the past two years has been VB + ASPX. One feature that is in the March 2004 Community Preview is symbolic rename (i.e., right-click on a variable/method/etc and select Rename, supply a new name, click OK, and VS renames all uses of that identifier without screwing up other code).
To be honest, the lack of refactoring and the lack of E&C for ASP.NET makes VB8 only marginally better for Web development than VB7 (2003). Meanwhile, the new refactoring support in Whidbey makes C# more attractive to work with in general (I can feel my rightmost finger preparing itself already;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;). I really do not miss E&C style programming but I do yearn for good refactoring support. (Note: the real benefit in 2005 for Web developers is in the many new features in ASP.NET 2.0).
I have not done much research into alternative VB refactoring tools. I've heard of some under development but haven't seen any yet. If you know of one, please leave a comment.