Hi all, am not sure if this is the right forum. I want to develop a distributed solution in vb.net. This will consist of several exe's which could reside on different machines, but will be on the same LAN - one of which will control the others. The other exe's (lets call them agents) will be started up by the controlling exe(the Controller). I need ideas on how the Controller can check whether any of the Agents are "alive" or have "shutdown". - I preferably do not want to use any third party tools. Hope someone has some ideas. Thanks.