Controlling Arduino with Visual Basic

Background
After experimenting with the Arduino board using only Sketches (the code for arduino) written in the text editor to run the board, I feel it is time to experiment using Visual Basic (VB) to control the Arduino.

Activity

The first step I will be trying is to turn an LED on and off using a simple interface developed in VB. 
Operating an LED through VB was very simply however it only allows 1 byte to be sent to the Arduino this prevent me from sending meaningful message and limiting to numbers and single letter this does not effect the small testing but when building larger program it may become difficult to identify messages sent. I have spent the last 5 hours research and trying numerous methods however I have still not found  a solution. It is getting late now and will continue research soon, explain what I have tried once I sort all the attempts out.

During the research I tried getting messages sent from the Arduino and displaying in VB however the problem I encountered was that since the Arduino run in a loop in real time when using and event in VB the message was not always complete and were sometime unreadable.

Conclusion

The conclusion is that there are things that could not have been expected without testing individual aspects of Arduino and glad that I have devoted time to testing different areas rather then jumping in to it.

Next Step

Further research is needed with a plan to identify all aspects of the problem.