Well even though I currently am programming in VB I must admit it really is a poor development environment. Most of the controls that it ships with are riddled with flaws and are missing common, necessary features, forcing you to buy third party components or build your own. It is not Object Oriented at all in my opinion. Its events never fire the way common sense would dictate they should and 99% of the time the event you need doesn't exits. Its error msgs are worse than windows. And I ABSOLUTELY HATE the datagrid control but currently have no choice but to use it. If I had to choose a language that would be the standard I would ahve to go with a combination to perform nTier architecture such as Perl/JavaBean Business Logic with a Flash/XML/JSP/HTML front end and an Oracle Database so you can stay away from Microsoft.

Don't get me wrong Microsoft makes excellent software, in theory, not in reality. Its Microsofts ideas that cause real programs to be made by other companies.