BASIC as it was and VisualBasic are mostly not the same language, like how you can't say C is going strong in business because C# is so popular. Even Classic VisualBasic is more like Object Pascal than the line-numbered BASIC dialects people who learned on eight-bit micros and MS-DOS used.
I vaguely recall a Joel Spolsky (?) podcast years ago mentioning that everyone thought it was dead, but a survey showed something crazy like 30k active developers worldwide. And that was classic VB, not VB.Net.