I'm in an unusual situation. A colleague of mine wants to "learn programming" and, being a developer I have been tasked with teaching him "programming".

Personally, I am self taught, and have never taught any sort of skill to anybody else before so I am not quite sure where to start. Also, I still have a heck of a lot to learn myself (although don't we all)!

I write in C# but is C# a good language for a beginner? I was thinking that Visual Basic .Net would be a better starting point, so was considering getting him setup with Visual Studio Express 2010, teaching him a few basics (variables, functions, classes etc) then finding some programming challenges and asking him to work through these. Does anybody have a good source of these sorts of challenges?

Also is this a good strategy?

Finally, what are your experiences of teaching programming to somebody else and what advice would you give?