The .NET Story continues

Up to now, I was actually under the wrong impression that you'd need Visual Studio.NET to be doing realluy serious .NET stuff. Point is, bacause we're oriented on Visual Studio 6 almost exclusively in my company, I was skipping all .NET stuff when I was searching for VB code. You know, -.NET in Google :)
After installing the .NET Framework the other day I started to read more on the subject. Now, I also installed the .NET Framework Software Development Kit (a 100MB download from MSDN), and the freeware IDE Web Matrix (in it's 0.6 stage at the moment). The first one is so impressive that I need some time to loose myself into it. Web Matrix is a simple IDE (no IntelliSense, not very elaborate. But what would you expect?). Anyway, with the SDK it should be possible to make the same Windows Forms and Web application as with VS.NET, only without the environment that takes so many things out of your hands. And well, coding in a basically text based environment is better than letting the software do 'everything' for you. Doing it the software way will not be help you very much in the case you'd want to set up something without the IDE. But for now I know I sign off my VB6 newsletters and find some good ASP.NET ones. Please let me know which ones are the best for someone just starting