Create a Web application - What is the best and easiest way for a newbie in web programming?

Create a Web application - What is the best and easiest way for a newbie
in web programming?

I have experience developing Desktop application (not Web application)
using Visual Studio 2005 to 2010 and C#/VB.NET (Preferably C#). Now, I
have to build a web application, this would be my first web application.
This web application should be published in a Windows 2008 server machine
which uses IIS as a webserver and it has a basic UI where user should
select the tests to be passed which are:
Pings localy and remotely to other machines
Check if a port is opened in another machine (sockets)
Check if a Windows service is started and running (status) on another
machine.
Check if an SQL instance is running and available on another machine
The web application must support multilanguage
The web application must support authentication, I mean, a login form
where user enters username and password.
As I am completely new in programming web applications, I have thought in
using ASP.NET and C# under VS 2010 (NET Framework 4.0) because Visual
Studio IDE is much easier to understand and rapidly program something and
there a lot of things automated like login control, multilanguage is
relatively easy to implement using resources files, there are specific
objects already created to do pings (Ping object), to check a port using
sockets (Sockect Object), to check if windows service is running
(ServiceController object), etc... I think using other tools and
programming languages like PHP or javascript will be more complicated to
do those things for a person totaly new in programming web applications.
So I think the best choice for me is ASP.NET. Also as far as I know those
things are imposible to do using only plain HTML code, right?
I would like to know your opinions and guide me in the right direction.