Nubie to VB, need to send DDEpoke command, Help?

Hi,

I am new to programming and would like to accomplish what I thought would be a simple task. I have done some simple programming with VB, but need to jump ahead a little to get a task done. I have an older piece of software that is setup to communicate with DDE and all I really want to do is DDEpoke a command to the software, but VB does not recognize the DDE commands. What files do I need to add to my project to make this happen? or am I swimming up stream?

any help would be great

thanks

Norm