Hey all, in my spare time at my job I've been brainstorming where to take our flagship application down the road. In a nutshell, this app is:
- a desktop app
- written in VB6
- uses MS Access databases
- minor web connectivity (license and version checking, and FTP uploading).
- input consists of reading files containing private data
- performs financial computations
- produces lots of charts, tables, and reports
- has been under revisions for close to 40 years (aka at this point, much of the code is a patchwork)

For many reasons, including the fact that new finanial regulations may cripple our application, we're looking at different ways to migrate and augment this application to meet demands for the future.

Personally, I was raised as an OO programmer on C-style languages, and had to adapt to older ways to maintain this program. There are a lot of issues I have with it, and am interested in taking it in a much more modern direction. However, I am undecided in which direction to take it, and so would love some advice or helpful suggestions as I do my research.

Some other info about our resources:
- We have a full MSDN subscription, and so are much more interested in MS technologies (aka .NET instead of Java)
- We are interested in moving this to the net as an online app
- We may want to have both on and offline functionality (that is an issue with a lot of unknowns at this point)
- We clearly want to migrate to a different type of persistence
- We presently only have 2 in-house developers
- There is some debate about using VB or C#: the other programmer has only ever used VB, but I at least feel it is easier to find new talent more familiar with C-style languages, which would help us down the road.
- Many of the key algorithms are embarrassingly parallelizable, so we definitely want to try to take advantage of this opportunity for improved efficiency

I originally envisioned something along the line of a MVC setup where two views are created... one of ASP.NET and one of a desktop app. Then I looked at Silverlight once I read about the out-of-browser features. In any case, I have next to no experience with any of these technologies, and would love to hear of any suggestions or recommendations you all might have about where I should focus my research on.

Thanks in advance!