I just had to weigh in on this subject. First I agree with almost everything written on this topic (except for that written by DigitalError). I've been programming in VB for over 5 years (started with VB3). I've seen the language mature and get better over that time.

Fast is a relative term, if fact most programs spend more time waiting for a user to respond then it does processing. Also much time is spent retreiving information from database (I would doubt C++ is going to perform this action faster). To test this theory I have compiled some of my applications using the native code compiler in VB. I've found that they don't get much faster but that do get much larger. All in all if your application does'nt do a lot of computational type alogorithms native VB code is just as good as C++.

Regarding bjeeing comments regarding his age and the age of his costudents. I teach beginning and intermediate level VB at a local technical college and I have found that is usually the older non-traditional students that are more willing to learn and apply what they learn. The more traditional students still seem to be caught in the high school mentality.