You need a service, you could opt for different ones, but i'd recommend a REST service from devices. Amongst those the thing going at the moment for sheer ease of development is the Web API.
I didn't manage to find an example in vb.net but i did find a good place to start looking into that.
ASP.NET Web API Samples | The ASP.NET Site
Ultimately if your tags a right and you major in Java, then consider using whatever place your devices connect to interact currently (java?) and use the backend to make available to your vb.net environment