Alice 3.0 to release too late for my son?

My son is just starting learning Alice 2.0. He is 10.5 years old, and has taken off with creating worlds in Alice 2.0. We plan to use Dick Baldwin's lessons to give him a GOOD intro to computer programming class using Alice. He should be able to finish those lessons by the time he turns 11 in June. And since the idea of learning Alice is so that they can then move onto more "real" programming with a good foundation, it seems that by the time Alice 3.0 is released, he will already have "moved on" to the "next step". (My preference is Visual Basic .NET but he may decide to go for Java so that he can use it in Roblox, too. I wll be able to handle helping him learn whichever he chooses.)

Would Alice 3.0 be a good tool for his "next step" in learning computer programming after "mastering" Alice 2.0 since he can advance into Java with it? Or will he be better off just moving onto VB.NET and/or some other Java environment at that point?

Thanks for your opinion,