How would you display the menu of a Sharepoint 2007 website in a .net web application out of the Sharepoint context?

Question

I have a website in Sharepoint 2007, as any page I use a .net menu to display the page hierarchy. This works when i am using it in a Sharepoint webapplication because i am in the Sharepoint Context. The problem is that I have a web application that is not a Sharepoint Application but must have the same menu as the website in Sharepoint 2007. Imagine this hierarchy:

-Products
-Services
-Weblogs
-contact

Imagine that Services is in fact a link to a .net webapplication. How to get the rest of the menu in the most optimized way. This menu must be always up-to-date, if it changes,it must be reflected in the .net webapplication

Answer 1

Use a custom xml sitemap provider. Both applications can be configured to access the shared xml datasource and a timer job or similar can be coded to update the xml as required.

MSDN Customizing Navigation Controls and Providers

Code project SharePoint Custom Site Navigation

Answer 2

You could make some calls to the SharePoint API that walk the current site and subsites and figure out what items are going to be displayed in the menu. This would not be theoretically the same as the actual menu that SharePoint displays, but I think it could be refined to the point where it reliably produces the same data (assuming you are using a menu in SharePoint that is autogenerated as opposed to a custom menu). If you were feeling adventurous you could also load the SharePoint page programmatically and parse the HTML, which would probably be reliable once you get it working.