I agree VB is (or was, last time I used it) useful for quick mockups or proof of concepts.. the trouble was, those tended to very quickly become 'proper' applications, and then you ended up chasing your tail trying to find some obscure bug due to some obscure interaction of components that wasn't being fully exposed by VB.
Welcome to my world when it comes to my brother's applications

I haven't used the new .NET variants though, aside from a quick dabble in C#, so I can't really comment on those. I just have an enduring hatred of it from my VB6 days.
They are much more consistent, but more limited at the same time (as in a PITA to go outside the APIs - though no bad thing in these virtualisation days)
I do quite like Perl..
I'm sure the YaBB development team would love to hear from you, esp if you are good with database programming as well

You're right though, I wouldn't try writing a Windows application in assembler, that would be tantamount to suicide 
Every man has to do it just once. Just a simple Hello World. Just so they can say they have
