If you already have experience coding in c/c++, I could not in conscience recommend Visual Basic as a programming platform.
Certainly, it is easy to learn and a very rapid development platform for simple graphical interfaces. The downside to this, however, is that it becomes very difficult to do anything outside of the given scope of the language.
Trying to implement a binary tree to find an optimal huffman encoding of a short string required representing the tree as a string in prefix notation. You can imagine the speed loss traversing this tree (The strings involved were short, and disk operations meant that the delay was transparent, but this isn't always the case).
To cut a long story short, I would recommend Visual C++, mostly because of its power, reliability and extendibility.
White Fire