I just have a question about what the best approach would be for a project I want to work on since I've never worked with access or databases.

Essentially I want to create a database and have a program written in vb (using express 2013) pull data from the database and display a lot of that info based on users filtering or searching for something specific.

I know I can create a database directly in visual studio and I just started watching your Access tutorials but I don't know what the advantages of one over the other is and how easy it is to work with each one. I've used LINQ queries briefly in vb and I saw you can create a query incredibly easy in Access from your video. Can you export those queries to a vb program or get the code for the queries from Access?

I want to have a list box that's populated with data from a field (lets say name), then when the user selects a name in the listbox it displays other specified data associated with that name, similar to how you filtered the results based on state and had it only display the first and last name.

I guess my question is if I create everything using Access, including queries and all this stuff, would I be able to move everything into a VB program? Or would it be easier to just do everything (including the database creation) inside of visual studio? In the end I want to distribute this to others so I don't want something that will require Access to use.

Thanks in advance

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Reply from Alex Hedley:

I show a quick way of connecting to an Access db in .NET
Here you can build the SQL string dynamically or you could add filters to the grid based on your selections.
You can connect the db in .net and have it in your connections tab and work with it directly with the gui.