Which Language?

Through their Dreamspark programme, Microsoft have made their Professional suite of development tools available to full- and part-time students for free. As my primary job rôle involves software development on the Microsoft .NET platform, it then seems natural for me to use a tool such as Visual Studio 2008 for the development of this project.

The one question that remains, however, is which language - VB.net or C#? Coming from a hobbist BBC BASIC programmer background, I've followed through with ASP, VBScript, VB6 and all flavours of VB.net since, and never seen the need to learn C# (although being aware of most of the syntax I'm still able to follow it with little effort); in addition, since both VB and C# compile into bytecode for use with the .NET CLR, there should be no performance difference between the two.

For long term maintenance of the software - in particular, if it were to be passed on to other developers - would C# be a better choice? Just to add to the temptation to learn the language, a few months ago a copy of O'Reilly's 'Learning C# 3.0' landed on my desk; a result, it transpired, of my having won a competiton in VSJ some time back.