FWIW I think that those who say that there is no one 'best' language are correct - the reason there are so many is largely because each is aimed at solving particular classes of problems (eg Perl - string manipulation, C - systems, APL - mathematical problems, etc).

I cut my teeth on Pascal and later Delphi (which is pretty much an enhanced Pascal) in a professional capacity, and I never found much limitation with either - but then...

I have writtten a webservice in .Net 1.1 using C#, that exposes an existing COM+ application as a webservice to remote web applications.

The COM+ application works fine under Win 2000, XP amd 2003. and the webservice works fine under Win2000 and XP.

However I have been unable to get the webservice working with our COM+ application on a Windows 2003 server, although I can use the same COM+ application from a Windows...