O.K. here is what i need. I am writing a program it is called Auctioneer it is a program that makes selling and buying on auctions a ton easier but i want a feature that i do not know how to do in .net i want to be able to send instant messages to other people who have my program running and i want to be able to tell when my "buddies" are online. stuff like that. basically it is going to be and extra feature that lets you IM people from the Auctioneer software. BUT!!! I do not know how to do it with VB .Net actually i do not know how to do it period. But i want it! I need to know how to do this if anyone could help me out! Thanks a lot!

Oh! ! more thing i do not have a server so is ther a way to get around that? Could it be done by using each user as "a tye of server" kinda like napster i guess.

Basically what it comes down to is i want it to be able to send a message to a user without having to know a big long ip address each time because everytime i dial up to the net my ip address changes. i was thinking maybe the user would log in at the auctioneer site and somehow when they logged in their current ip address would be saved (with their id) and then users could loo through a long list of names for people then click the name and the name would just be a front to hide the actual ip address. How can i do this in vb .net