Passing in and gathering data

[joe_pool_is]

I am putting together a small project that will run on a PC that I want to be able to interact with online services.

Here is the idea (very basic):
From the PC application, the user clicks the ONLINE button which sends data to a website. The website returns a value that the PC application can then work with.

Here are my questions:
1. How would the PC application send data to an ONLINE application? I have added links to open websites before, but I have never passed data from variables.

2. How does the ONLINE service retrieve this information? I have noticed from search engines, etc. that information is often passed using Question Marks (?), ampersands (&), and space indicators (%20%). (For example: The link I am currently on is: http://www.xtremedotnettalk.com/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=62) How does my .aspx application gather this info?

3. How does my ONLINE service return a response to the PC application? Would I need to declare values in my application as Public and try to write to them using the ONLINE service? (I seriously doubt this would work, but that's all I can think to try)
Obviously, I have never done this before. I have created simple .aspx forms on a website that someone would have to direct their browser to, and it in turn would send emails or populate databases. I have never had an application that could interact with a web service directly.

Thanks in advance for any of your help,
Joe

 

[Bucky]

This is exactly the scenario that XML Web Services were designed for. What you do is design the Web Service
project to have classes and methods that can be accessed (they must be Public and
have the WebMethodAttribute attribute). Then add a "Web reference" to the service
in your Windows app; the namespace for the Web Service is added
to your project and you can access the classes and methods just like any other
class that's locally in your project.

Read up on "XML Web Services" in MSDN; there is a lot of good info there.