Best Web Development Language

Soliciting opinions…
I am a Chemical Engineer with no formal training on web development and need to develop some simple reporting applications based on SQL data.  I am familiar with basic VB programming syntax and have developed some detailed VB applications; however I have not developed any web applications.

I need suggestions on some good learning resources (web or training) to learn how to fit all the pieces together (HTML, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, AJAX, CSS, XML, Web Services, etc…).  I have a MSDN subscription and use the Visual Studio IDE and have played with Microsoft Expression.  Honestly, there seems to be a mountain of technical matter I need to understand before making a decent ADO driven web page.   The syntax is killing me and the standard ASP.NET controls are very limited.

So, for a beginning web developer, what resources do you suggest?  I would like to stick with VB…

BTW, the application I will be developing will have the following features:
1.  Allow the user to select between 5 different plants (SQL servers).
2.  Select a date range.  Oh yea, is there a decent free calendar control?
3.  Select the desired product from a drop-down.  I actually have this working.
4.  Select multiple product batch ids from another multi-select drop down.  What control do I use for that?  Syntax?
5.  Return data for the batches selected in a “table”.  Would like to be able to collapse / expand data for each batch.  Would you return all the data to one dataset, or have one dataset per batch?
6.  Datasets will contain information that I want to chart on an X-Y plot.  Microsoft’s chart control is not powerful enough, but their Office Web Component chart is.  I have a program written in VB6 that presents this information.  I just need to do this on a web page.

I know, the question is a mile wide, but I’d appreciate any input.

Ni