Ok, I used to be pretty good at BASIC all those years ago, and work currently as a network admin on Cisco equipment, and was thinking of trying to teach myself how to write some stuff for Windows.

My question is this: What would be the best software to use, what language does it need to be? I've seen J, C, C++, J++, etc.

Next question, and probably the harder one is can I get something like this open-source? As in, I don't need to buy the frickin' MS developers' suite type thing.

Any ideas or suggestions would be great.