I don't see why people bash VB so much. It's great for whipping up nice looking win32 applications extremely quickly (time is money), you can still access other libraries (i.e u can make graphical renderings with OpenGL in VB, as well as with direct3d). About the only thing is isn't suited for is intense 3D games (because of speed), but you can still even make some pretty sweet games with VB. As a side note I hated VB, I did the Visual Basic 6.0 programming book in 10th grade and just found it so damn boring making database applications, but I understand why people do like it and use it.