okie20

OK, Im starting something new for myself and was wondering how to go about setting up a server and client system over the internet. I imagine it would be a lot like a chat room type thing, but not real sure. What I am wanting to do is have a program that people in my family can open up and make football picks. And since my family is full of procrastinators, I imagine Sunday morning would be a busy time. Anyhow, I need to have a host that can handle multiple connections and then client software as well. Do I need to write two different programs? Additionally, is Net.Sockets what I need to look into? If so, which classes for this namespace will I need? I looked online and saw the tcpClient class and tcpListener class. Are these the ones to look into? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

okie

throwaway18

There are several ways to approach this.

The usuall way would be to pay for some cheap web hosting that
allows you to make dynamic pages with cgi-bin scripts/programs.
Web hosting is usually done with apache one a unix-like platform.
They generally allow the use of perl and PHP, maybe java.

If you want to host it yourself off a home connection then you will
need a computer running all the time. Some ISP's have rules against
servers in their terms and conditions, block ports or put you behind
but in general it works.

You could write your own webserver that listen on a port,
parses incoming http request and sends a reply but thats
a lot of work for nothing. Apache is free, you might as well
just write somthing that interfaces with it.

If you really want to write a webserver from scrath then
read the RFC's that describe how http works.

There is microsoft IIS, microsofts web server software but I
advise against it due to its terrible security record and the
difficultys of patching it to a secure state.

There are loads of books and websites about making dynamic
websites. Go and read them.

okie20

Thanks for the info, but Im not looking to create a website. What I am trying to do is allow a family members to connect to my computer over the internet and exchange data. I understand that it is done easier through a webservice, but thats not what I feel like doing.

intraman

i would disagree about IIS, i belive it to be very secure