Hello,
@eried I guess you are an experienced Eclipse user? I'm very interested to hear what you didn't like about visual studio or the visual micro plugin. The combination provides a very useful development system for both new and experienced users. A free tool that provides everything the arduino ide provides, is 100% compatible with arduino but with the added benefits of intellisense, code completion, error correction, super fast compile, memory usage reporting and much more 
Read more about arduino development in visual studio: Arduino Learning by Example
@truck56 There are many happy users of arduino for visual studio. We would like to help you fix any install problem you might be having. Please register for our forum so that we can guide you through a fix. It will be very easy I promise. Because the plugin is free we have to reply on users coming to our forum for help. We can't find the time to scan the many forums that service arduino users. Please do join the forum thanks.
As a Visual Studio user I can answer your question as follows:-
Add a Timer control to your windows form. Set the Interval of the timer to between 50 and 100 milliseconds. In the OnTick event of the Timer you can add code similar to the following. We assume, as you have said, that you have an open serial connection and the arduino is sending data to the pc.
This example assumes the arduino has sent "Hello Wold" using the following arduino code:- Serial.println("Hello World");
This is the VB.NET code in the OnTick event behind your Form.
//Tip: DoubleClick the OnTick event on the lightening button of the timers property box to have an OnTick event added to your code automatically.
//Sub OnTick_Timer1
if mySerial.BytesToRead>0 then
dim myStr as String = mySerial.ReadLine()
myTextBox.Text = myStr
end if
//End Sub
Tip: If you find you have become experienced with vb.net or c# graphical controls then please join the beta team for our arduino debug solution. The solution contains an open source extensibility system that enables you to use your .NET user controls while debugging arduino. Alternatively you can grab the source of our examples and use them in your own projects. This might not be relevant to you but thought it worth mentioning. Join the beta team by emailing beta [at] visualmicro.com.
In the image below you can see normal C# and VB.NET windows controls communicating real-time with the arduino debugger.
Read more here
This is also a good article and will provide you some useful example source
I hope you find or found your solution, Tim