Visual Basic 2010 (Windows) Guide
Conway's Game Of Life:Exploring Further

Improvements

A good starting point would be to tidy up the application and add any functionality that you think is missing at this point. A zoom feature or an extended grid would be the most obvious way to improve what you have here.

Another angle you might pursue would be creating images for each generation on a smaller grid. These images could be used to make an animated gif that would be a better representation of the dynamic nature of some of the patterns.

Deep Thinking

The application currently keeps track of the number of generations that have passed and informs when a pattern no longer produces a change on the current grid from the previous generation. You could use that without the animation to identify new shapes that last a while.

Different Rules

The rules that Conway chose were meant to ensure that patterns evolved rather than exploded into life. Also that there would be the possibillity of self-replicating patterns and that there would be as few rules as possible.

You can make your own rules and see how your own game of life plays out.