Pejorative hackerism for VB.NET (Visual Basic for the .NET framework). VB.NET has been marketed by Microsoft as an updated version of the previous Visual Basic on its .NET framework, but VB.NET is really just C# with a slightly different syntax and fewer libraries. Migrating existing code from Visual Basic to VB.NET is generally impractical because VB.NET has a large number of unnecessary incompatibilities with Visual Basic. Since VB.NET has essentially nothing to do with Visual Basic, a well-known ex-Microserf suggested that VB.NET should have a completely different name — Visual Fred. This rapidly caught on.