Heck Bill, at 68 you're just a young pup with a good 20 years or so of code writing ahead of you.

I have the Enterprise Edition of Visual Studio .Net 2003 and have been using it for the past few years and it is fine for what I need. I'm not a professional developer and so I don't need the latest and greatest development environment.

As Rob Dog said, you might consider downloading the FREE Visual Basic.Net Express Edition and maybe also the FREE SQL Express, but I don't really think there is any need for you to spend a bunch of money on new software unless you plan on making this a new career.

Just some of my thoughts.

Take Care and enjoy your programming.