VB - Server communication

Question

How would I make a Visual Basic application talk to a web server? Someone will press something on the site and I want the application to display the information that the web site passes along to it.

Answer 1

I suspect there are lots of ways to do this but simplest would be for the web application to write stuff into a database which the VB app displays. Unless I'm missing the obvious?

Answer 2

one way in SQL 2005/2008 would be to use xp_cmdshell

Example:

EXEC xp_cmdshell 'dir *.exe';
GO

This could be placed inside the stored procedure that does the insert/update etc.

This would run a custom executable, that in turn can 'communicate' with your VB application.