Wow, a lot of emphasis on strong-typing. All sounds reasonable to me except the last one (if statements), that's just a pain in the ass.

Nukem - A lot of companies use VB. It's not jsut a toy language, it's used in many different areas for many different things. Look at the Office suite of programs - they all work with VBA behind them, essentially a custom version of VB. M$ are planning on making money from a new language (maybe not billions though), they've got C#. To be honest I'm not sure where this is going to fit in yet. One of the major reasons people use Java is because the bytecode it compiles to is platform-independant, and I would lay money that C# isn't going to be platform independant.