The table also communicates an important implementation difference between the two languages: The lack of a "static" modifier for Visual Basic classes. Visual Basic includes the Module type, which ...

Launch Visual Basic 6 or Visual Basic Express. Open the project file in which you want to create a module and command button that creates an Excel spreadsheet from selected data.

Clearly, Visual Basic can do static classes. But for reasons of history and clarity, it retained an earlier Module-based syntax, rather than adding a "Shared Class" syntax to its .NET implementation.