[Maggz]

I want to write some code for my game im working on that will allow users to submit scores, check for updates, and maybe view a message of the day. If this can be done or anyone has any good tutorials I can read up on please enlighten

[coderitr]

What you're wanting to do requires a central machine that will act as a server for incoming socket connections. Once you have established a connection and applied whatever security measures you feel are appropriate for authentication, the messages that you send back and forth between the client and server are completely up to you. What I've done with wireless communications layer is to send a message containing (1) a command prefix; (2) the length of the data stream and (3) the data stream itself. The server validates the length of the data stream against what is expected (element 2) to verify that all the data sent was received, interprets the command prefix as an instruction, and sends a reply to the sender using the same format. While the wireless comm layer that I've developed is in C++, VB has the same capacity for using WinSock. VB, however, goes about it a bit differently. VB uses a data received event to notify the application that data is incoming while you can "block" on the socket until a reply is received in C++. I prefer the latter as it is much simpler to manage a synchronous process that way. What I've also done when I need the front end in VB is to develop the socket communications in C++ and put it all in a DLL that I call from the VB application, thus achieving the synchronous processing that I need.