distant database woes

I have a database located on a web server and I need to be able to edit it using a vb.net desktop application. As far as I can see there are two ways to do this:

1) connect directly to the database somehow and reference it as if it were local or
2) using ftp, download the database, edit it offline and then upload the database again.

Unfortunately, I know how to achieve neither of these. I can achieve option 2 using vb6 and winsock but i am lost and confused with vb.net and the system.net.sockets namespace. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

If you can grab a hold of the ip address of the server and you know the rest of the connection/server information, you can connect to it via remotely.

I agree with Lethal but it might not be entirely true depending on security settings of the webserver, but if you're in control of that it should be possible.

Thank you for your replies, although my problem is still unresolved.

When a tcp ip address or url is incorperated into a connection string i am confronted with the exception messsage "URI format not supported".

How can I connect to a remote database?

Depends on what kind of database it is? Is it a SQL?

Currently using Access2000 but can switch to SQL if it better facilitates this purpose.

Well SQL has the possobility to use IP as URI I guess, but if that is not the case I'm quite sure it supports connection via http, there are a couple of example of this in the "Books Online" for SQL.