I am building a VB.net application which is supposed to serve as a Mission Control Center for our virtual aviation community's Space Shuttle Program. In this direction, I will have 20 people using this "MCC" to follow the shuttle. Within the MCC, I must connect all of the 20 open programs to each other so that for example if one presses the "EMERGENCY" button, all of the others will be notified. Also, I need to add an Instant Messaging or Telephony (VoIP) to this application. Currently, the way I'm doing it is: If one presses "EMG", this executes a PHP file on my server and the PHP file produces a text file which is being downloaded every 1 minute by every user. The software then interprets the message as EMG, emergency, and flashes a red light. But for every user, this will have a maximum 1 minute delay... This is SO amateur and it sucks because you have a 1 minute delay in notifications... How can I do this more efficiently. Please consider the fact that other users won't be able to do advanced stuff like opening ports for P2P connections. Thanks!

Ah... So this is the exclusive VB.net community?

Hello.

You should consider building up a central server to which each clients connects. This should work without problems with the TCPListener. There are also a lot of tutorials out there on how to do this (just look for Instant Messaging...it's the same thing).

What you're describing sounds more like a Peer-To-Peer Network, which is not (at least in my opinion) desirable for this.

Bobby

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