Web Page Scraping

I would like to write a visual basic application which scrapes data from local stores web sites about their current sales. I have dug around the net and cannot find a simple tutorial which tells me how to download a page and parse the text. I did find information on parsing the text, but I have no idea how to simply retrieve the html from the web site. I would greatly appreciate if someone could tell me how to do this, or where to find information on it.

Thank you in advance.