The first VB.NET release was versioned VB7, every hint we have shows that the team at Microsoft felt they were building the next version of VB. Given VB6's deep reliance on OCX/ActiveX, .NET was seen as the future of that and the fix for a lot of the bugs and problems of OCX/ActiveX.

Indeed, VB6 was essentially BASIC with OLE Automation object model bolted on.

(Which itself was designed to a large extent to match what VB was doing before, so it's a bit circular).

And let's not forget that .NET grew out of the "COM 2.0" project. Which started in 1998, at the same time VB6 was released.