And Scott, don't forget to give F# some love here, especially being as it is not on Roslyn and it's important its project system stay current with whatever son of MSBUILD becomes.
When .NET Core really starts to take hold outside of the Windows environment, and it will, there are people in those environments looking for a better functional-first programming solution than what they have, and it will be F#.
https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...
https://github.com/aspnet/Home/issues/236
http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/VB-Core
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/introducing-asp-net-5#after-c...
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/22697...
These days I'd lean towards JSON.Net before anything XML based if I can avoid it. WCF could use a little love too.
For example, we have a customer in health care area, where many of their researchers are using VB.NET for prototyping.
The type of stuff people on HN would use Python or R for, they use VB.NET.