IRC questions

I am writing an IRC client, but don't know how to communicate with an IRC server. What i mean is, what data do I send to the server? I know some things like /NICK and to send a PONG when you receive a PING, but are there any tutorials on IRC for vb.net? Also, I am sort of new to net.sockets and don't know how to receive data with it yet. Could somebody show me the basic structure of code for doing that? I looked at .listen() to make the socket listen to a certain port for incoming data, but it didn't seem to work for me. Thanks

Well, first start with this: RFC 1459 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1459.html) after you are done with that, you may want to look at this (http://www.xtremevbtalk.com/showthread.php?t=21541) thread, it's in VB6, but reading through the code was a great help to me when writing a .NET IRC class.