Data Access

For data access tools, you can find LINQPad very useful. This is a free tool that provides advanced instrumentation for querying data sources and that can generate the necessary code using LINQ. Visual Basic is one of the supported languages. You can find it at http://www.linqpad.net. Although LINQPad requires .NET Framework 3.5 to be executed, the generated queries can be reused in the current Visual Basic version.