Hi,

i am wrighting a chat program in Visual Basic 6.0 using Winsock. I have three computers at home one belonging to me another my sister and brother. what i want to do it basically make a program which will allow all of us to talk to eachother while we are on the computers, we are all on the same network.

Here is what i have so far
my program works so far but the problem is i have to keep on telling my bro and sis my IP add so that they can type it into the program for it to connect to me, i have done some reaserach and found something called computer friendly name. isnt there anyway i can substitue the IP add for this name and ask my program to connect using this?

so for example

Winsock1.RemotePort =123
Winsock1.Listen
Winsock1.Connect "127.0.0.1"

Can i not use

Winsock1.Connect "Thecomputer" ??

it doesnt throw an error when i do this and it doesnt work either so im not sure what is going wrong

any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

I'm not sure if WinXP's DNS API supports NetBIOS names, but you can try it:

'DNS Lookup
Declare Function DnsQuery Lib "dnsapi.dll" Alias "DnsQuery_A" _
(ByVal sName As String, _
ByVal iType As DnsType, _
ByVal lOptions As Long, _
ByVal iExtra As Integer, _
ByRef QueryResultsSet As Long, _
ByVal lReserved As Integer) As Long

'DNS Cleanup
Declare Sub FreeDnsList Lib "dnsapi.dll" Alias "DnsRecordListFree" _
(ByVal RecordList As Long, _
ByVal FreeType As Long)

The second one you'll need to run once you have your IP. The first one returns (via QueryResultsSet) a pointer to:

Type DnsRecord
pNext As Long
sName As String
iType As Integer
iDataLength As Integer
lFlags As Long
lTTL As Long
lReserved As Long
lData As Long
End Type

DnsType is a 60 line long Enum, so I'm not going to list it here. Just do a Google search for Windns.h, and that should at least give you the commonly enumerated values.