synth-ruiner on what sort of programs are you trying to make?
After learning and doing some programming exercises I would probably start with some of the tools I have made for my own use, over past 15 years, on Windows with Visual Studio Express 2008 (wich has been my favorite environment all these years). I hope to make a switch from Windows to Solus eventually and for this need some of these tools in Solus aswel.
One tool I use to move and rename pictures and videos taken with my phone. I have used a third party dll to read the jpeg and mp4 metadata. This could probably be achieved through shell scripting, but I won't lett that stop me for making a program for the job.
One tool I use is a single instance app to handle rigth clicks from Windows File Explorer to make backups by queuing requests to package folders to rar packages. It can take new requests while working on a previous task as it is multithreaded. To my knowledge rar is the only archiving format to support recovery data (which is a must) and my winrar license works with the linux version. Plus I have some custom filenaming procedures in the mix. There could be alternative ways to accomplish this, but to me it is import that only one archive is being made at a time.
One tool would be new. It would mimic the behaviour of Square Home 3 for Android (i.e. former live tiles on Windows 8) and function as an info dash and launcher for other desktop apps. I need animation to get the esthetics right so the html5+css3+js combo might be good for this project. I am looking to use devilspie to kinda blend it to the background wallpaper to achieve an interactive live wallpaper.
One tool I use to preprocess clipboard content copied from pdf files. If you ever had to copy paste lots of stuff from a pdf to notepad you should know what I am talking about.
Years ago I used Java at school for the compulsory programming courses with Eclipse. Based on that I think transition from vb to java would be fairly easy. A year ago I also updated my html, css and javascript skills through w3schools. I also liked XAML/WPF on Windows phone and actually had a few apps published - I think it will be close to what you get with these html+css+javascript for desktop development tools.
This could sound like I have my mind set, but I tuly am open to learn new tooling and language. Some limitations I do have: I do not want to fidle with any low level stuff, and prefer to use third party libraries / dlls when needed. My main interest resides with usability of any apps I make, so the ability to make good graphical user interfaces should be easy.