For many years I admired Microsoft Visual Basic (VB) due to its easy learning curve.  But I consider VB.NET's failure to enforce encapsulation a serious flaw; I require students to use C# for this class.

VB.NET can no longer be styled "easy to learn".  It has 145 reserved keywords (vs. 83 in C#), and many previous strengths have been removed.   Printing the contents of a rich-text box, for example, used to be trivial (there was simply a RichTextBox.Print method), but there is no Print method in the .NET framework richtextbox component.

The Windows Form Designer, which generates code when a programmer drag-and-drops a component onto a form, was formerly a unique advantage of VB.   But the C# integrated development environment (IDE) now has a very good Windows Form Designer of its own.  Although it is possible to do pure object-oriented programming in VB.NET, the language allows programmers to make use of global variables (via Modules).   This tends to decrease maintainability of applications.

VB.NET's IDE is friendlier--it automatically completes control structures and try/catch blocks, for example, but I expect the C# IDE will catch up in next VS.NET release.

C# is very like Java, and the learning curve should be fairly small for experienced Java programmers.  If you are not already comfortable programming in Java, you should not take this course.

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