VB, C#

Recently at workplace i heard our projects manager muttering something like "THEY ARE USING VB?? gosh, they must be total newbies", and eveyone around nodding in approval; well not exactly the same wording, but thats what i heard between the lines. So whats wrong with VB?
I myself grew in environment where VB was like "american thing", "not for real programmers", etc. And so probably that is the reason i never really tried it - well, except macros in VS. But still there is one thing i believe - having seen many opinions, and also from my own experience - c# is quite similar to VB. Haven't you heard developers migrating from VB to C#, and not that many complaints - this must say something. Needless to say, here write programs in C#, and well, i guess almost everyone here thinks it is the coolest language in the world. Of course, we can extend this further and say all OO languages are so similar -and of couse they have many similarities. IMO, VB and C# aren't so drastically different to make one "cool", and the other "ugly". If you dont't like VB keywords, this is exactly if you wouldn't like those C-style {}. I think this is not enough a difference, and i haven't heard any fundamental ones - all just a matter of taste.
And to think of it, is C++/CLI that different from C#? For me it looks like old good standard C++ plus subset of C# with different keywords. They all depend on same CLR, which i guess was designed mostly having one language in mind - C#. I think this has some implications on language, which is to target CLR, despite of what they say how CLR is so flexible and can support any language. If not for anything else, then for interop between .NET languages.