VB.NET into the Cloud

I have had to have a serious discussion with myself today regarding my future career and choice of programming language. Being self-employed, I am most often asked to develop cloud-based systems. However, my expertise lies in VB.NET. At the moment, I tend to write locally installed software that simply communicates with an SQL server. However, everything seems to be going in-browser and I am seriously concerned that my days as a VB.NET developer are numbered.

So, I suppose many of us will be in this same position. Should I look at sacking VB.NET off and developing up-skills in Javascript/Ajax/ASP/PHP/Web Languages etc or is there any good way of maintaining my VB.NET skills whilst still being able to move into developing in-browser, cloud based applications?

Obviously, i'd prefer to stick with VB.NET as it is a language I have invested a great deal of time and effort into learning it. Is Microsoft providing any good solution to being able to deploy VB.NET apps in the cloud?

I am aware of Windows Azure but still not sure whether it would be a good option. What do you ladies and gents think on the matter? I realise that this a problem many of us are concerned about at the moment and i'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Jordan

You can use VB to create ASP.Net MVC applications for the web. You can also use VB to create Azure applications for the cloud. You should also invest in learning Javascript and jQuery but there is no reason why you can't stick with VB for web and cloud development.

Thanks Joacim,

I've been reading into this and wrongly believed that ASP.net was a language unto itself. I think i'll start to teach myself how to use it. Extremely relieved quite honestly that Microsoft are supporting .NET in this way. Am I correct in saying then that, if I didn't want to use Azure, I could develop a ASP.Net MVC and then upload that to, for example, a rented VPS server and have it run that way?

(Although I think I will be going with Azure for ease of use)..

Jordan

No, ASP.Net is not a language but rather a framework for building web applications. There is also today two different frameworks, ASP.Net WebForms and ASP.Net MVC and I strongly encourage you to learn the latter.

If you should use Azure or not depends on what your clients want. Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of having their data stored on Microsoft's servers. It's also a question about what the application is supposed to do.