Creating a distributed application?

I'm creating my first Distributed Application with any Programming language and am using VB.NET which I'm quite new at. This Distributed application has a Database with over 50,000 entries in it. Each user will want to access these records and be able to update and view them, cycling through each record individually (with forward/back buttons). There's a lot of data there as each record has over 170 columns.. It seems like a lot of data to drag over to the dataset so I was wondering of other ways of doing this. It'll be really memory intensive and when the app loads up it'll be really network intensive for a while!!!! Could I drag over 100 rows at a time or something like that? Has anyone got any code or ideas to help me along?

Help the Newbie!!!!... thanks in advance