reading textbox from remote machines

Hi there,

I am not very experienced with vb (im using vb 6 at the moment) so im not sure what im really looking for.

What im trying to do is pretty simple:

Write one program, which will connect to 30 odd machines... which will be running a seperate program. When a certain text field on a remote pc changes... i want the text sent back to the first program.

I have been looking into dcom but cant really find any code examples of connecting to a remote pc to do this.

Does anyone know what i need to do in order to do this?

Thanx

Did you write, or do you have source code for, the program that will be running on the 30 machines? It would be a lot easier if they sent a message to your one machine when the text changes.

well what we are trying to do is write a stats program which will show live stats on what staff are currently doing. Its basically a program that the directors of the company can use to monitor performance of staff.

the program wont be running all the time, for example, it may be opened for 10 minutes on one machine, then closed for 5 hours, and opened for 5 minutes on another machine.

we have an sql db, which the software currently uses... so all the hostnames of all the clients and the monitoring software will be saved in there.

we want to connect outwards from the monitoring software to the 30 clients.... this way we wont have to wait a few minutes for the clients to realise that the monitoring software is running on a machine and have them connect to that.

However once the monitor software has connected to all the clients... we could have the clients send the change of the text field.. so that the person monitoring gets a pretty much live status of what all the clients are doing.

How i'm wondering how to do this.... i was thinking NetDDE but thats been removed from vista (although we are not using vista ... we do want our software to be compatable with it in the future).

My second choice is dcom... which i think will do it... but i havent actually seen any vb6 code that shows a client/server setup on two different machines that exchange data.

The third choice.... maybe use something like winsock... and just do it manually.

Fourth choice, use a VNC - server on each of the 30 computers, client on the monitoring computer. Connect to a server and watch what's being done on it.

we already have vnc.

but the program we are coding is more of a stats thing.... basically the company in question is a call center.... the program shows all 30 users at once on a screen... shows how many hours / minutes of calls they have made, how long they have been in wrap, etc etc.

but we want to have a live status as well... so that on the stats window... it shows what they are currently doing (if they are on a call, if they are in wrap, if they are in ready, etc)

basically just need to transfer whats in txtStatus.text on the 30 client machines to this one stats program

we heavily use sql database which is quite a few GB in size now.... so we can save the current status of all the clients to the table in the sql database every 5 or so seconds for each user and have the stats window constantly refresh that table because it will add allot more load on our server.

we are just trying to find a way, using dcom, to get the contents of one text box off 30 machines, live.

Thanx