The thing that facebook got right is making it not about you, but rather about your friends. That is why most people check in. Not to post but to read

lmao. That's ok, I used my omnipresence to check them out already.

Hi Max I meant no disrespect to you individually. There are a lot of well seasoned VB professionals out there. I just believe that proportionaly, there are more good C# programmers and more poor VB programmers. Clearly you are not one of the later,and when you chose VB you were already an experienced programmer. Going back to the original post, I still believe that a newbie should start with C#, unless they have the good fortune to land a job learning from the likes of yourself, in which case they probably wouldn't have a choice anyway. But given the choice... -Dan

hehe! I thought my post might get such a response. I didn't suggest "Switching from VB to C#". The question was simply about what a complete beginner should start with. Now. With the benefit of hindsight.

My main reson for recommending C# over VB is one of culture. When .NET first arrived those who went into C# tended to come from the advanced worlds of Java, Delphi and C++. Those who went to VB.NET tended to be those used to using VB. At the risk of offending some people, there were a lot of VB programmers who were inexperienced, not formally trained, or even informally trained for that matter. In a way that was what was great about VB. Anyone could do it. So you got bob the accountant upstairs hacking together a quick VB app, and I think my step mother threw something together in VB once. As I say. Anyone could do. This could not be said for C++, Java or Delphi. People from those worlds just tended to be more professional because they were generally professional programmers. So on the whole, VB programmers are unprofessional hackers and C# programmers are experienced, professional, seasoned coding gods. Who would you want to learn from?

I found that AVG was a bit of a resource hog. When you have a new Quad core machine with the best RAM money can buy and it grinds to a halt every time your system is scanned by AVG, then you know there is something wrong. At first I thought it was a problem with Visual Studio but that was only because I am always using it so it is usually the first thing to slow down. It turned out to be an IO problem. AVG was making many thousands of paging file writes and everything stopped working. I have 10,000rpm hard drives too so that wasn't the issue. The IO issue also explained the slowing down of Visual Studio. During compilation VS makes many small reads and writes to and from hard disk. It is a necessary evil but you can't get away from it. So when AVG ties up the hard drive with virtual memory paging, IO suffers for everything else. My 4 cores sit around running at about 0% and my system becomes totally unresponsive until the scan is complete. I had used AVG for a 3 years before I switched to Avast and the improvement has been noticeable.