Questions about Programming in General

[TrickyNick]

Back when I was barely an adult (age 16-17) I went to a tech school for programming. I didn't know a lick about computers or programming, but I know since I was in elementary school (3rd grade) I wanted to be a programmer.

After I graduated from there, the school hired me to be their program assistant, to help because the teacher that was teaching after I graduated didn't know windows programming (VB, QBasic, etc) and they needed help.

That's the extent of my programming background. Fastword some 18+ years (I'm 34 now) and I want to get back into programming. I really haven't been keeping up to date with everything, but I have done some VB.Net 2010 programming, and still enjoying it but know my skills are lacking compared to where other people my age are with their skills.

Anyways, what should someone my age do to get back into programming advance his skills and try his best to catch up to his peers?

I seem to prefer VB over anything C (C, C++, C#, etc) as I never really liked C when I went to the tech school.

EDIT:
I've always done webpages in ASP (not .net) as well and, here at work, VBA stuff with Excel.

EDIT 2:
Also, there's a big university here that does offer programming I think, but not 100%. It's NSUOK.