I've searched this (and other forums) for a while, and a good idea to make a program check for an update is:
  1. The program reads a file from the Internet. Said file contains the number of the latest version.
  2. The program compares its version with the version inside the text file.
  3. If there is a new version, ask or download or whatever, it doesn't matter in my case.


Ok, but the thing is that I'm not quite sure how to make Visual Basic read a file from the Internet. Using the Open statement is easy for a regular file on the computer. But if I try to use Open and type in the file's URL on the file directory field, it gives me a "Bad file name or number" error. I didn't upload any file yet, but I tried to make it load an image from a regular site and the error showed up (and VB6 is capable of loading any file with the Open statement, including images. Obviously, it'll show up as garbled text that needs to be deciphered to become an image, but that's a totally different story).

So I have 2 questions:
  1. How can I make VB6 load a file that was uploaded to the Internet (and read its contents)?
  2. Does anybody know of a good file uploading service that can be used for this? Because some file uploading services don't allow direct links, and thus the only URL I can give to VB6 is the download page URL; not the file's URL.