Actually you can do this entirely with freely available components if you can do without the GUI designer tools in Visual studio, the VB.Net is available in the free to download .NET Framework SDK from which you can build your interface and you can create Windows Scripting Components using Perl as described in Re: Creating a COM/OLE server, Personally I would go with C# rather than VB.Net but that's a matter of taste I guess.

/J\