Some Very Newbie Questions ~ Database Interaction & VB

Hi there...

I used to build VB apps like 4 years ago with VB 6.0 and using VBA with Access. I've since moved on to bigger and better things and I'm now a SQL Server Developer.

I've done a lot of cool things programming in SQL Server itself IE functions and stored procedures and using the Report Server to deploy our reports on our intranet.

However, I need to do some cooler things now. I need to be able to have my users update tables ... put in custom information in a form and send it back to the server to actually change values in tables and things.

I thought an easy way to do it would be to create a VB application. So, I had IT install the real version of Visual Studio 2005.

Here are my questions:

#1 Am I actually using VB.NET in Visual Studio 2005?
#2 I added a dataset to the windows application I started, and it put the connection information in as XML. Is that good? What can I do with this dataset?
#3 If I want to accomplish what I need to do ...should I be writing ADO to connect to the database? If so, do I use an ODBC type of connection or just standard ADO? I'm not entirely sure how to write a SQL Server 2005 connection string and then how I interact with it.

Sorry for the long post, but I've been out of the game for a long time and unfortunately, for me, programming is not like riding a bike... I do forget! I used to be able to just start writing VB but now I find myself at a loss.

The most I've gotten my application to do so far is display the contents of the table that I connected to. I have looked at the help files and tried to figure this stuff out...but I'm not sure if its tailored to the program that I'm using and what I specifically need to do.

Any help is appreciated.