Why?

Why did I write a compiler?
When I was studying computer programming at Universidad de Belgrano, one of my fellow students mentioned that "at least they don't require us to write a compiler anymore", making reference to earlier years when the students seemingly were required to write compilers in order to finish their degree.
This obviously made me want to write a compiler, not to finish my degree, but to only satisfy my geeky desire to do something nobody else wanted to do.

Why did I write a compiler for Visual Basic.Net?
Visual Basic was the first computer language I learnt (way back at high school in '98 I got my hands on VB4, later on it was upgraded to VB5 and then VB6), and I did actually like it (no comments on this one please :) .
Later on I started learning C++ (but I didn't like it since the relation between "tangible results"/"amount of code written" is way lower than for VB - in other words it took me far longer to do the same thing in C++ than in VB), and Delphi (which after about half an hour of trying things out the compiler started throwing internal errors at me, so I figured Delphi wasn't the language for me either).
This happened about the same time as the first beta of VS2002 came out (VB7/VB.Net), I had ordered a copy so I was trying it out and learning about the new VB.Net language, and I liked it way better than the previous editions of VB, so the choice wasn't really that hard. Besides, I couldn't find any other VB compiler (non-MS and compatible with MS' version of VB) out there, so it always feels good to create something new :)
The original intention was to write a compiler that compiled VB.Net into native code (I did actually get it produce a HelloWorld.exe, it was however mostly hardcoded into the compiler), but when I got to learn more about the managed world I realized that the intelligent thing to do would be to create a compiler that compiled IL to native code and therefore targeting several languages in one hit. The amount of document-reading required to do this (I would have to learn IL, assembler, the PE file format...), made it completely uninteresting, so I rescoped my project into creating a compiler to compile VB.Net into IL, just as vbc.exe does it.

Why did I write the compiler in Visual Basic.Net?
It didn't start out like that, I first tried C++ (yes, even though I didn't like it, but I thought it was a great change to learn it better and maybe make the mentioned result/work relation better). You can actually still see this in the code (check out the comments at the end of this file). The effort didn't last much though, after a couple of days of debugging memory leaks and seeing weird compiler messages all the time I got bored and figured I'd have to change the source language if I was ever going to finish anything at all.
Next try was VB6. I'd read everywhere that no sane person would write a compiler in VB6, so I decided to kill that myth. After a couple of hours the myth had survived. The lack of inheritance in VB6 made me crazy, I saw myself either copy-paste huge amounts of code, or write it all in functions, with no OOP whatsoever, neither very pleasant alternatives. Especially now that I was learning the new Visual Basic.Net language. Once again, the choice wasn't really that hard.