Custom protocol loading program?

I'm not sure if this is possible, but I'll ask anyway because it's something I've been interested in doing for a while.

Some file sharing programs and even Apple's iTunes use a custom protocol to load files/data in an external program. For example, Edonkey I think uses ed2k:// and iTunes uses phobos:// . Basically if you click a link with the data in there, it loads the external program up with the parsed information i.e. phobos://123124124.1231.songname='test' would load the song 'Test' in iTunes.

I've been looking at doing this for one of my programs. It's basically a sports stats engine and there's a lot of referencing of data on the forums for the engine. It would be incredibly immersive if I was able to link players' stats/records/any data at all to some sort of protocol, for example mystats://playersheet=195, which would load player ID 195 in the program. Is there any possible way to do this? Obviously I would then need to sort out parsing those details once it was passed to the .exe, but I can't figure out the first step, or if it is possible with VB.

Any help/guidance/info would be appreciated.

P.S. Sorry for my English, it's not my first language.

I believe that these connections are made in the registry. Your app needs to place the right keys in the right spot and it will be called if the user clicks on a link with that scheme.

But don't forget: parsing the URL, contacting the server and parsing the response is all up to your program.

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...ry+protocol+ie