wel choices are PHP or ASP/ASP.NET for the pages, and some variant of SQL for the database

hii.. You should see the site www.webdesigningcompany.net .This is very good site and will be very helpful for you.

dont create a forum yourself. even dani didnt make techtalk all by herself (although she did do a lot) - get an existing forum engine and customise

why not? It's not that difficult and you can learn quite a bit in the process.

a decent forum is hard - why do it when you can get a free or cheap one?

i still prefer to create my own forums manually than using pre-made forums available.. by installing my forum manually, i can have full control over my forum.

If you create the forum manually with intentions of a large user base you must be very careful with your security.

Large forums are like fat wounded sheep, easy to manipulate.

So word to the wise - If you plan on creating a forum from scratch make sure you invest some time in learning about software security.

The most popular forum scripts are phpbb and vBulletin.
Phpbb is free while vBulletin costs about $160. There are several others. Just do a search on google.

Oh yeah! It's easy to make your own simple forum.

Here's the simple one I made (I didn't make any design to it, because then it's easier to just to copy the code from FTP into the place I'm gonna have the forum).

I used some codes from W3Schools.com except the frontpage, cause that's with pagination and I got that code from somewhere else. Just take a search at Google