Also, I don't know how long ago you tried Mono + VB, but especially since MS started collaborating with Mono and offering upstream first-party support (~2 years), support for the IL has been almost production quality. (Now it is production quality - I'm running some of my customer ASP.NET applications which was built around the NHibernate rather than EF/MS SQL on full Linux infrastructure).
Satya is making a ton of bold moves that are basically antithetical compared to the Ballmer-era MS. Visual Studio Code (yet-another-electron-based-editor) and Community, along with the ridiculous amount of open stuff on Github has effectively eliminated the vendor-lock-in stronghold that Microsoft previously had. Residual Office renewals and upgrades on the MS SQL stack will only get them so far. They're going full Docker[1] support on the new Windows Server stack, as well as full .NET support off the Windows stack, which is interesting to say the least. I wonder if we'll start seeing them buying out companies that are traditionally aligned with more-open-sourcey.
A bold move they could make would be buying out Cognitect. Datomic could be a perfect fit for them. Integrate Visual Studio support (e.g. as good as IntelliJ/Cursive) and give CLJS first-party support (let Nolen take a lead spot on the TypeScript team) in VS and it could be a steal at even a few hundred million dollars. The talent (Hickey+Nolen) the developers who they bring over + the perception shift within the dev community + the Datomic itself is likely worth a half a billion to MS.
[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BrainstormingDevelopmentWorkfl...