Ever since Ive learned VB and stopped using it Ive wanted to learn C++ (or something), so now I found a book I had bought but never touched, for Visual C++.NET 2003. And now that Ive started trying to do stuff in this language, Ive been on IRC a lot and people keep telling me to stop learning C++.NET but they never care to explain anything and im totally lost.

Ive heard about C++, C++.NET, C++/cli, Managed C++, C, C#, C#.NET etc etc
but I dont know the characteristics of them all and I cant find a comparison of them either.

Well my requirements for the language I will eventually chose are this. I will program applications (not games) for Windows. I will use Visual Studio .NET. And I dont mind spending more time learning a more difficult language if there are other advantages like it is more useful or it is faster than other languages. Also, I want to learn a language that is not obsolete or old and will be useless in the near future because nobody uses it anymore.

Could somebody who knows anything about this please explain a few things because I dont know what the differences are and which language to start learning.

After a bit more talking ive found out that I do like the fact that I can use all different languages in the same project with .NET, and that I can use C++ code to make web applications with ASP.NET, so then I have decided to stick with .NET even though it may be slower and requires the framework.

I also discovered that C++.NET is old and obsolete and C++/CLI is the new version, so then the two languages that remain are C++/CLI and C#.NET. Which should I chose, and why? IIRC, C++ is more useful than C# and it can also be faster so that would make me chose C++ /CLI over C# even though it may be harder to learn, but are there other pros or cons?

That depends on what you wanna do, I went the C route a while ago as I'm very interested in low level stuff.

If you're going with .NET the language is merely syntax, it doesn't matter which you choose as they all make use of the .NET classes and the managed framework.

Managed makes a lot of sense depending what you're interested in, but, you will gain a lot from learning an unmanaged language such as memory management etc and it'll help you understand how it actually works.

I haven't written anything in C for a while other than a small prog to retrieve ID3 tags, I much prefer writing things in python, it's easy and quick, but as I said before, it depends on what you wanna do.

What's faster is largely irrelevent nowadays unless you're writing number crunching apps, and it's especially irrelevent with .NET as it all gets compiled to bytecode so it all ends up the same.