I started programming 20 years ago on GW-Basic. It was a learning tool for the concepts of programming but a pretty awful language.

Over the years, I've programmed in more languages than I care to think about. Ada, BASIC (several flavors), C, C++, CLIPS, FOCUS, Java, JOVIAL (gag), Modula-2, and Pascal all come to mind. I'm probably leaving out some others.

In the end, if you're writing for the Windows platform, then VB is a good language for getting the job done. I have not tried VB.Net yet, but I've heard some pretty good (and very bad) things about it.

The most ambitious VB work I ever did was a couple years ago when I was doing some contract programming for Compaq. I was on a team that helped create the Compaq Crash Analysis Tool (CCAT). While the core of CCAT was written in Java and executed CLIPS expert system rules, virtually all of the backbone was written in VB.

Just to give you an idea of what you can do with VB, one of the programs I wrote for CCAT was used to migrate the old expert system rules from a VAX-based system called Canasta that used RDb for the database. I imported the old data from RDb, translated it into the new schemas, performed error checking on it, then uploaded the data into a SQL Server database.

When system experts wrote new rules, another VB program would run to automatically convert the database values into CLIPS code. The CLIPS code would be compiled and made available for distribution to users around the world.

Another system monitored for incoming crash files from a variety of sources, invoked CCAT and performed automatic analysis, and posted the results to the problem logging system.

VB isn't as cool as C++ or Java. It can't do low level system stuff and isn't portable to non-Win32 platforms. However, it can do quite a bit, and it won't take forever to write. I wrote the proof-of-concept code for the CLIPS generator in a couple days, verified it worked, then expanded it to production code in less than 2 weeks. VB was a good choice because of its string handling abilities. It got the job done.