I'd love to hear a bit more about your take on DSLs, as I'm playing around with building a DSL for our internal CSLA development. The idea of generating a full CSLA-based framework from a visual interface is pretty attractive to me...

OK, enough of this stale old VB C# debate. I proclaim myself lord of opinion and and insist on leaving my two cents worth here:
1. VB and C# are programming languages, not identities or personalities. If you find yourself lacking one of those, find it first, it'll make picking a programming language much easier.
2. You can be 'in the money' with any programming language if you know what your outcomes must be.
3. The language you use WILL change in your lifetime - so will many other things - get used to it. If you are programming the first thing to change will be the color of your hair, if you have any left.
4. The evolution of computer languages is near the beginning, not the end. Rejoice, many wonderful and magical things are coming still. You can be part of this if you keep on writing code.
5. The word 'NET' becomes really interesting after a fullstop. 'Never before has one framework done so much for programming in such a short time. Ask not what your framework can do for you but what you can do with you framework!'
6. Morts are Elvises and Einsteins in the making. Many of them will never make it. Have some compassion.

If case-sensitivity is obsolete, why did XML have to abandon its original plans for being case-insensitive, and opt instead for case sensitivity?

The reason XML made this u-turn is because case insensitivity is culture-dependent. Whether two strings are considered equal varies according to where you are.

For example, consider the strings "visual basic" and "VISUAL BASIC". Are these the same strings in a case insensitive world? If you're American or English, chances are you'll say yes.

But what if you're in Turkey?

Turkish has two forms of the letter 'i' - one with the dot and one without. So the letter "i" is emphatically *not* the lowercase version of the letter "I". They are different letters in the same way that "v" and "W" are different letters.

And there are more complex problems with case insensitivity. What's the lower case version of "KONIGSTRASSE"? If your lowercase version has the same number of characters as this uppercase version, then perhaps you might want to consider that this is probably a German name and try again...

Accents present another set of interesting issues here too.

Case-insensitivity requires one of two things. Either:

1) the ability to specify which culture you'd like to use for string comparison

or

2) forcing one culture on everyone

Option 1 clearly isn't a viable choice for a programming language - you don't want a program's meaning to change just becase you're compiling it in a different country. This leaves you with option 2. Not only is it a form of cultural imperialism, it means everything looks broken for a wide range of languages.

It's a peculiar world view to regard globalization as a form of obsolescence.

ok