Well typically you'd have a client/server architecture for your application, so the client vb.net app will talk to the server application and it will handle access and authentication to the database back end. You don't necessarily have to do that, but it's commonly setup that way so the server application can control data access and not allow multiple clients to write to the same sql records. You could add some kind of control to your client and not have the server application though too.
Any ways all you really need is for the server to allow tcp 1433 through the firewall if there is one and the account the client is using access to the database. If you're using a SQL account and it's the same you should be fine there.