So, I am working on a little side project and well I wrote a standalone application in Visual basic it will connect to a MySQL database on my server. I asked a few people that are database experts and they said it could easily be done. But that is all they would say, I have looked at a tutorial online and it looked really good. It is a 7 part series of a tutorial which can be seen HERE but I was wondering is there another way to do it without having to use a connector?

I have written a PHP version of my application, but it's not what I want because I do not want to have to open a browser to use it. Does anyone have any ideas?

You can use PHP for desktop gui applications using http://gtk.php.net/
It has been a while since I used Visual Basic, but as far as I know this http://paulbradley.tv/37/ is about the other way to connect to mysql. I would probably post it on a Visual Basic forum or search around in the msdn documentation site