Or you can use this:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1765
You just write a user control that inherits from a base class and implement the callbacks that receive dashboard packets. You can write it in either VB.NET or C#, whichever you prefer. You don't have to parse anything or worry about the serial IO. There are a few nice controls in the 2008 control library. It also has a UDP packet relay that lets you share the data stream with another PC running the dashboard software.