I would also recommend bloodshed.net's Dev-C++. I think it's great. It was actually written in Delphi. Delphi is a language that isn't really too hard to learn and get good with for most.. and it has flexibility. I don't know of one other OOP language that can spit out an app as fast as Delphi (Object Pascal) can. I've been programming in Delphi for around 2yrs now (including Kylix for Linux). Just started about 1 year ago with c++ and some x86 asm about a year before that. I wouldn't waste my time with VB (including VB.NET).. but that's just me.