Even easier... Dim myWindowHandle As IntPrt = frmMain.Handle RageInTheMachine9532 "...a pungent, ghastly, stinky piece of cheese!" -- The Roaming Gnome

That's the whole problem of any P2P network: finding peers. There's not a single solution and not a perfect solution. You can try connecting the last peers seen, have a central server for locating peers, or some always-on, highly-reliable peers. Yes, even I am blogging now!

The NetworkStream object doesn't fire any events. You have to poll the DataAvailable property of the NetworkStream object to see if there is something to read. You can look at this[^] example for a demo of DataAvailable. RageInTheMachine9532 "...a pungent, ghastly, stinky piece of cheese!" -- The Roaming Gnome

If you write the value as a String to the file, you can read it back an use something like this to get it back into a TimeSpan object: Dim newTS As New TimeSpan Dim fileValue As String ' read the TimeSpan from the file and put it in fileValue. newTS = TimeSpan.Parse( fileValue ) RageInTheMachine9532

Thanks, that's good to know. It's been way too long since I've dealt with hardware. I'm afraid I'm slipping into the old power luser category. I half remembers enough about old hardware to make me extra dangerous.:-O My goal is to look at code like a chessmaster looks at a chessboard to see positions and possibilites beyond lines and characters.

xtremean wrote: i've never come across how to get the string in a text box on one form another text box/label/whatever on another form. That's because your thinking about the code on one form directly manipulating the controls on another form. The reason you don't see that in the books is because it's bad practice. What you should be thinking about is having public variables somewhere that both forms can access. For example, you have two forms, one has a string that needs to be passed to the second. The first form just has a label, a textbox and a button on it: Public Class Form1 Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form   Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click Dim newForm As New Form2   newForm.strDataThisFormNeeds = TextBox1.Text newForm.Show() End Sub End Class Form1 is simple, just type something in the textbox and click a button to send the string to Form2. The code in the button click just creates a new instance of Form2 and set the public variable that Form2 exposes to the string in Form1's textbox. Form2 just has a label and a textbox on it and exposes a public string like this: Public Class Form2 Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form   Public strDataThisFormNeeds As String   Private Sub Form2_Activated(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Activated TextBox1.Text = strDataThisFormNeeds End Sub End Class This is just a VERY simple example and does NOT show all the possible methods of passing data between forms! RageInTheMachine9532

xtremean wrote (via email): i...need to be able send text strings, .jpg and .bmp file types OK, so this might not be the simplest solution for a "newbie".... that being said, here's what I would imagine doing if I were writing a custom application to do this kind of thing: On the client side you'll have some kind of form, possibly attached to a NotifyIcon (for ease of use, like an IM client) that allows the user to select a file (or files). Using the File and FileStream you open up the client file, establish a NetworkStream connection to the server using TcpClient and TcpListener and use NetworkStream and FileStream on the server side to read the stream and write it to a file. The server is going to listen on several ports for several incoming connections, each connection a TcpListener running on its own thread, so there would be the need to start each on its own, using Asynchronous callbacks and the IAsyncResult interface. At a network level, if it is over the Internet, you might consider a establishing a VPN connection between the client location and the server location, which should protect and encrypt the transfers and prevent having to write code dealing with that aspect of things. Then again, you could establish an FTP site somewhere and get WS_FTP Pro, or something, and enable people to upload to the FTP site. This can even use SSL for encryption, protecting the confidentiality of the information being passed.

If you are using VC7, MFC has a new class called CImage that lets you load any image format. OR You could use a the new CDHtmlDialog class and use HTML to display the jpg. Art

Whether you beleive or not it is really as easy to play a wave file from your app as writing the following: sndPlaySound("c:\\yourwavetoplay.wav",SND_ASYNC); Put it into your OnInitDialog override to play it on application startup. However, in order to use it, you have to add the windows multimedia library to your project So, BEFORE you call the above line, add to your code: #include "mmsystem.h" #pragma comment(lib,"Winmm.lib") Peter Molnar