I had a genius idea today to try and create a website that would access our CRM database and will report on support cases.
The idea would be to have a page that would be visible in the office and members of the support team can view the current status of support cases.
I've downloaded the CRM SDK and I've read a couple of manuals, but I can't seem to find a decent starting point for a complete rookie..
Are there are good tutorials out there on how to create a website that will communicate with CRM's database, preferrably for a VB.NET application.
There are several products that implement your idea. The most famous one is the Adxstudio, you can find a community edition (also for CRM 4.0) at this address:
http://community.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-portals/
After you can check the source code, but they use C#