I recently realized that I have in my favorites the link to the Learn Visual Studio.NET site selling many videos about programming in VB.NET. Mostly stuff for beginners, but that's exactly what I needed - my wife is learning how to do software development and with the book(s) we bought before the pace was really slow.

The webcasts though free are not the way to go in this case. There are many and few can be watched as coherent series of videos. Learn Visual Studio.NET has a dedicated series for beginners to programming in general, with exercises and all.

It's working. My wife went through 10 lessons already and she seems to be progressing fine. She asks the right questions and is getting increasingly comfortable with the Visual Basic 2005 Express and MSDN library. Thanks to Microsoft, she has great and free tool at her disposal. It doesn't hurt that she has a great teacher too ;) if I may say so myself. The coolest remark - she got scared when she noticed that the new forms designer does not show grid anymore (“where are the dots?!?“) but was relieved to discover the guidelines that help perfectly align controls. She discovered all this by herself so we can safely conclude that Visual Studio team did at least one feature right :) One other thing - since there are no dots, it's impossible to visually discern labels with no text now (good catch, this didn't cross my mind at all).

I would definitely recommend video learning to everyone. It's not just for the lazy people that don't want to read. Actually seeing something on the screen is a lot faster and more effective that struggling with thousand words and dozens of screenshots.