Student - Career Advice

[The Developer]

Hi,

My name is Shuaib Latif, I am 17 years of age, and I am currently studying at college and I am looking to work towards building a solid career in software development. In the long-term I wish to become a technical large-scale software developer.

In the recent weeks, I have been undertaking an immense amount of research in software development. I have read about the various phases of software development including analysis and design, implementation and testing. I wish to work primarily in application implementation (writing applications) and, object-oriented analysis and design. I have looked at the programming languages and developments that are ‘hot’ today, and I have no idea where to run. There all sort’s including C, C++, Java and even the new .NET framework. I have been programming with Visual Basic 6 for over four years now, but I wish to work towards building a solid skill-set so when I come to find a job, I have a very good chance of working at the forefront of developing large-scale database or technical applications.

I have tried looking for jobs recently as a part-time VB6 junior coder, but all the companies seem to ask for many years of experience. At the moment, I can't get my 'foot in the door', and without working there's no chance of gaining experience. My current skill-set includes Visual Basic 6, ADO, DAO, SQL and SQL Server database applications.

Is it worth taking my time to learn C, C++, Visual C++ and Java?, or could I possibly plunge stright into the .NET framework and look into Visual C# .NET?

Can anyone give me a structured approach to which language to learn and what areas are possibly hot to work in, and how to get into a part-time job to get solid experience with my current skills?

Thanks