Direct Connection

What would be the best way of sending data directly to someone through their ip address? No servers involved.

As in, you type their ip address into this program, (a port?), and your message, and if they are running this program, they receive said message in the application.

Should I send packets, use some .NET state of the art class that I am unaware of that sends messages and such, or some other approach?

I'm looking for a direct way to send data from one computer to another, be it text, an image in the form of an array of bytes, or whatever.

Thanks. :)

Windows Communication Foundation is the VB 2008 library designed to do this. Google it and you'll find a ton of examples on how to implement it.

You can also look at System.Net.Sockets as well as TcpClient.

The application of yours would need to use a TcpListener to listen on a specific port for incoming connection, and a TcpClient to connect to other hosts.
Or you could use the corresponding UDP classes. But I dont think that would be needed.