communicating through serial port

Basically i am a electrical engineer and i have developed many circuits.
Recently i am planing to develop a circuit which can check the surrounding temperature and give the output to computer through serial port.

I have also worked on vb but not much and i want to know how can i get the data from serial port and to utilise it in my program.

Use the MSCOMM control for this. In the help are some little examples how to send and receive data from a com port.