Having spent some years working with Microsoft Access, I am new to Visual Studio. I thought I would point out some trivialities that have made this transition bearable maybe even enjoyable!!
Debug Working Directory
When you finally get you project into a suitable state to hopefully viewed by others, you will eventually want to publish your application. If you go into the Properties page for your application and look under Debug option you will see the following:
In the 'Working directory' entry put the directory that you want your project to exist in. If in your code you type:
Public Shared Function GetComboContolList()
Dim doc As XDocument = XDocument.Load(Environment.CurrentDirectory & DOCFILEPATH)
This is the 'Current Directory' of this project. If you don't do this you will find that the project is referring to the debug directory for this application. It also sorts out a lot of confusing messages that the system sends to you, because the system does not know the working directory for this application. Life is a lot easier when this 'Working Directory' is completed!!!