I'm working on a project that will have numerous components. I intend to have multiple components running on each of several computers. Originally, I thought that I could broadcast UDP signals from any one computer and have them picked up by multiple components on either the same computer or other computers in a LAN.

Under VB6, it was possible to establish a connection between two programs running on the same system. This doesn't appear to be possible with VB.NET. It appears to be impossible to have two sockets using UDP and listening on the same port. When I attempt to set up two sockets and bind them to the same port, I get the message "Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted."

Technically, I could get around this by having only a single listener on each computer delegating messages to each process, but it isn't quite as nice a solution, especially since I want to bring modules on one after another. Ideally, each module would not need to even know whether or not it was sharing a system with other modules, and UDP appeared to be the way to do this.

Any suggestions?