Collecting Information and mail From the Internet with a VB2005 App

[temek85]

Ok First of all I have a few questions and I was wondering if any of you know how to answer them. First I would like to know how you would go about collecting news stories off of the internet to display in an application. So basically when my application starts up it shows a home page and I would like to have it show some top news story’s but I don’t know how to make the program collect them off of the internet. So any ideas or information would be helpful. Also I would like to know if anyone knows of a way to Check if you have mail from a VB 2005 application, so when you start up the program it will ping the yahoo mail server and tell you if you have mail much like AOL or Trillian does when you start it up. That way when my application starts you get the top news stories and it will tell you if you have mail or not. Any help or ideas will be very much appreciated.

Thanks

 

[IfYouSaySo]

google RSS ("Really Simple Syndication"), this might be of help to you...

 

[Blake81]

Try http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/learning/http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/videos/latest.htm. If you look on that page, there is a 16 video series about how to create an RSS reader application. It's a very informative video series, and it moves at a nice slow pace.

 

[shroomy]

If that stuff doesnt help, and the source of your data is pretty well formatted (and the format doesnt change too often)

you can grab the data by using the webclient object, and then parse out what you need (and i happen to have the code, from the last post i answered )

Dim objWebClient as New WebClient()
Dim aRequestedHTML() as Byte = objWebClient.DownloadData ("http://vbdotnetforums.com")
Dim objUTF8 as New UTF8Encoding()
TextBox1.Text = objUTF8.GetString(aRequestedHTML)


You can also use the same approach for email by using the object to post back the data to the webpages you need to get the data .. so all the html data will be in memory and you can do what you want with it.

Im not recomending this approach, there is almost surely a more efficent way to do what you want, but this approach does give you the most control about grabbing data off the net.