One of your first steps to serious .NET development should be creating and implementing flexible typed datasets to maintain control and protect the validity of your data.
If you're a .NET newbie coming from Access or SQL Server, let .NET do the hard work of creating a connection to foreign data. Then customize the resulting control to add functionality.
This short introduction to .NET shows Access and SQL Server developers how to use a development tool to create connections to data and a user interface to manipulate that data.