Well, you can use the normal winsock approach, which is not very pretty. Works great though.
I just couldnt be bothered to copy and paste.

What I am bothered to do however is tell you that you can Shell the ping command, and ping the computer's name. The response will come back from the system's IP address.

If you goto a dos prompt, and do ping www.microsoft.com, the IP responds.

So you could ping the name, pipe the results into a file, and then parse the file.

- jamie