Hi,
I have never tried it and I never used basic again since the Commodore64, but you can use every programming language to talk to an Arduino as long as it knows how to talk to a serial port. .NET2.0 has the SerialPort-class so VB should work.
(You don't want to write sketches for the Arduino using VB, do you? We are talking about exchanging data with a running Arduino-sketch don't we?)
Eberhard