Visual Basic and the future of Web-application development

For the past decade, Microsoft's Visual Basic has been the programming language of choice for Windows-application developers. And recently, Microsoft has made the popular language available for Web-based applications. However, as a growing amount of application development targets the Web, other languages, such as Sun Microsystems' Java, appear to be challenging VB's dominance. VB has remained popular despite prior changes to the language. However, there may not have been as many viable alternatives as there are now today, other languages such as Java and C++ have become Web-development tools of choice. Developers may decide to use these languages because they are more mature and because VB.Net will be more complex to learn and use.