Yes Sockets will be best for creating a real time system like MSN Messenger etc.

You can use TcpClient and TcpListener classes to do this which both are wrapper around Socket class and hide many complexities providing a friendly programming interface to novice network programmer.

When 2 parties are connected using above 2 classes then you can use NetworkStream to transfer data.

All the above classes reside in System.Net.Sockets namespace and MSDN have got very good explaination and samples of each.

I hope this will help.

Best Regards,

Rizwan aka RizwanSharp

Hi,

it probably will involve socket programming but you have many ways of communicating, low level network programming, web services, remoting. Remoting is nice because it allows you to pass objects between different processes, I actually made an instant messenger application using it, see http://www.markdawson.org/software and you will be able to look at some sample code.

Mark.