Oh, so much discussion, where to begin my response...
I think the VB is getting a bit of an unfair rap here. It's not the best language, but I think it comes off sounding worse in this thread than it really is. It is in fact used in a lot of mainstream major production software (where I work for instance). Both VB6 and VB .NET are used for serious production applications. It may not be the best for games (especially if you don't
thoroughly understand what you're doing), but as GameDev 1.x proves, you can not only make games, but real-time scrolling game engines with reasonable performance in VB6 if you do it right. Now in the sense that you really have to know what you're doing to get the best performance out of VB6, I would agree with Dr Obvious that you might want to learn a lower-level language than VB if you plan to be making serious games where you need the best performance. But I'm not sure how important that is right now. And I suspect you can eventually learn similar lessons using more enjoyable languages than C++.
C++ has been the mainstream language for serious development organizations (yes, we use C++ where I work too, not
just VB) for a long time. But I'm really starting to believe that .NET provides us with a new generation/layer of languages that offers so much more power and ease of use (while limiting the loss of performance, understanding and control over the lower levels) that the trade-offs may finally balance in favor of these new languages over C++ for the majority of applications. I won't jump into a detailed explanation of each aspect of these trade-offs just now, but suffice it to say that I have programmed extensively in VB3-6, VB.NET, C, C++ and C#, and based on my experience and training in .NET, I think .NET-based languages may be good not only for improved overall productivity, but improved learning curves as well. Now that VB .NET and C# are truly object oriented languages, they can offer a much cleaner representation of real object oriented programming concepts, and without the pitfalls of C++ unmanaged pointers.
If you have the stomach for it, certainly go for C++, and you will probably be forced to understand how programming and compilers work at a pretty low (and useful) level. But I don't think it's necessary any more to start at that level if you're not prepared for the complexity involved. You can still learn the same performace-enhancing lessons using newer languages now that they don't hide quite so many details from you as VB6 did.
On to the next topic: Visual Basic 2005 Express... where are you reading that this environment is not good for serious development? I must admit that I don't know much about the express editions. But I can't imagine how they would have limited it so as to be un-useful even for applications like SGDK 2. I suspect that SGDK2 would compile under the express editions of Visual Studio. Perhaps now that durnurd is staying at my house for a summer internship we can both take a look. Would you be interested in an Express edition if it turns out to be reasonably powerful after all?
And finally, it sounds like you are trying to program in C# without having Visual Studio. Indeed that is painful. Surely Visual C# 2005 Express or Visual Basic 2005 Express could make your life significantly easier there so you don't have to spend hours finding documentation on every little command every time you want to do something new, and finding out how to compile all the different kinds of pieces without Visual Studio. I wrote a batch file to compile SGDK2 without Visual Studio, and I can tell you it's not going to be much fun for a newcomer... not nearly as much fun as using the IDE to handle the gritty details
.
Maybe I sound bad for recommending skipping over some of the nitty gritty, thereby posing a risk that you'll never learn how things operate at a lower level. But I think programming should be fun, and you should get to see some of the cool things you can do in these environments right away, and then go back and learn the details of the environment you're most interested in. If you get bogged down in the details before you even get to anything interesting, another risk poses itself: the risk that you'll give up on a powerful and interesting language because it looks more complicated than it needs to be. In that sense, you might even benefit from trying Visual C++ 2005 Express because I suspect the new environment for that will be pretty helpful too.
OK, this message is long enough
