When I had sid working I was doing some programming with mono-vbnc and found out something that likely will be useful for others if they take this path. On http://www.java2s.com in the vb.net tutorial, avoid all g.u.i. stuff since when you put it in a console-based program to run with vbnc, it's going to throw an exception and not return any useful information. Stick to Console.WriteLine and Console.Read and Console.ReadLine for input/output and all will work fine so long as you remember to use a Try exception catching loop around any of those read functions.
