John,
If you have a question about Visual Studio 2008 like you did it, you cannot
expect an answer, what is in your eyes an improvement can be in others eyes
a disapprovement.
To give a sample, the "with" statement is seen by classic VB users as
something good, I do not like it because of reading and maintenance. For me
it is only there because of backward compatiblity. (Please no discussion
about this, it is just to show my personal preference).
Beside that is in my opinion this newsgroup not the right place for your
question, like Armin wrote some days ago. The GridView is not a part of the
VB language but is used by the VB language. I think that this question would
be more in place in the newsgroup microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet.
Cor