title: Project Eulers problem 16 in visual basic. Sum of digits in the number 2^1000
body: <p>Project Euler's problem 16:
  2^(15) = 32768 and the sum of its digits is 3 + 2 + 7 + 6 + 8 = 26.</p>
  
  <p>What is the sum of the digits of the number 2^(1000)?</p>
  
  <p>I have been trying to do this problem for a few days now and i just can't figure out how to get vb.net 2008 to recognize anywhere near that large a number. I have seen in other posts that some software like java has the integer type BigNumber or BigInteger but i cant find anything like that in visual basic. I'm running into this problem a lot using Visual Basic. I also can't seem to find any of the standard upper level math features in visual basic such as factorials and a few others that i can't remember but couldn't find under the math feature. any suggestions? (Sorry let me rephrase, any suggestions on how to do this stuff without switching to a different programming language.)</p>