I agree with Lou also, get a copy of VS 2005 express.
To learn a language, pick a project. Do up it's requirements, so you have a good solid goal. One that's not to ambitious, but deffinately more then you think you can handle. Pick something fun and interesting, like not a file manager. Here are some things I've done in the past:
A.I. Football Simulator (The Pittsburgh Steelers Always Win!) -- It randomly chooses a logical schedule, picks plays, and goes through the sesion displaying images and scores for each game.
A fish finder with pictures and a back end database. It had simple meshes for each fish drawn in DirectX. Kinda Fun, but I never finished it, learned alot though.
My Current Project, Outerspace, a big sci-fi RPG.
I showed my code for Outerspace during three job interviews, during all three, all I got was accolades and sincere respect for the work. I got one offer from the three also.
Certification is dime a dozen. Real source code, project documentation and intelligent discussion of such is more impressive IMHO.
Try to avoid the GDI, cause that will bog you down, become boring and it's easy to learn that stuff otherwise. I have not used a GDI element in bloody ages.
You could learn by cribbing off of others like tutorials and looking up what you see in a good book.
You will definately need to get familar with object oriented concepts. VB.NET is highly object oriented. Remember the three pilers!
