Don’t know what Bill is talking about? He’s talking about a relatively innocuous addition that has been made to the Debug class in the System.Diagnostics namespace. If I had to guess I’d say that the modification was made to make code migration easier (ha! thats the least of your problems) from VB6 to VB.NET easier – but it also makes VB6 programmers more plug-compatible with the .NET Framework.
The only think that makes me cringe about it is the fact that Print is used in very few places elsewhere in the framework as a verb and its a concession to a language (admittedly one of the big two for .NET) which muddies the waters a little bit.
The argument is whether they could have intercepted calls to Debug.Print in the VB.NET compiler and redirected them to WriteLine – but then you need to think about things like stack traces returning non-obvious execution paths if an error occurs down in a TraceListener.
Would have been an interesting discussion on the VB.NET team I think.