After debugging a particularly tricky issue in VB.NET involving the order in which instance variables are initialized, I discovered that there is a breaking discrepancy between the behavior that I expected from C# and the actual behavior in VB.NET.
Nota bene: This question concerns a slight discrepancy in the behaviors of VB.NET and C#. If you're a language bigot that is unable to provide an answer other than "that's why you should use C#, noob", there is nothing for you to see here; kindly move along.
Specifically, I expected the behavior outlined by the C# Language Specification (emphasis added):
When an instance constructor has no constructor initializer, or it has a constructor initializer of the form
base(...), that constructor implicitly performs the initializations specified by the variable-initializers of the instance fields declared in its class. This corresponds to a sequence of assignments that are executed immediately upon entry to the constructor and before the implicit invocation of the direct base class constructor. The variable initializers are executed in the textual order in which they appear in the class declaration.
Contrast that with the portion of the VB.NET Language Specification concerning Instance Constructors, which says (emphasis added):
When a constructor's first statement is of the form
MyBase.New(...), the constructor implicitly performs the initializations specified by the variable initializers of the instance variables declared in the type. This corresponds to a sequence of assignments that are executed immediately after invoking the direct base type constructor. Such orderi