Basic SharePoint Programming HOWTO

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VB

SharePoint

I have to start saying that i have never worked with sharepoint before and that this is my first project, and im not sure if its possible to do what i want to do, so this may sound like a really newbie question. Hopefully not at all
I do have good VB.net background and im very good at that, but not how to work with the sharepoint access model.
I access a sharepoint site to get a list of tasks and i want to create a custom WinForm app just to display them and get an alert once new task arrives
I know that i can just download the page and then manually parse all its contents, but that wouldn't be anything related to "sharepoint programming" nor use any sharepoint client libraries, so i would like to know how this process have to be done using the sharepoint programming model

I have started with a very basic query, by reading some examples on the web and all that i got is a 500 internal server error in response

Imports Microsoft.SharePoint.Client
Dim context As New ClientContext("http://root.url.of.sharepoint.com/")
Dim web As Web = context.Web
context.Load(web)
context.ExecuteQuery()

I have loaded the 2010 sharepoint dlls but i think the sharepoint site im trying to access is 2007, does that is possible or i need to get the 2007 dll libraries to start of?

i would like to appreciate some starting insights on how to accomplish those tasks.