I've got a basic system tray application running. I would like the user to be able to right-click the app, choose Update, and have the app go to a website and get the latest news. The latest news would then be displayed in a form for the user to read. (This is similar to a rss reader, but running from the system tray). Later I want to add calendar functions, etc.

Sidebar: The news will be entered by a user using a basic web form - and is completely separate from the system tray application . Two questions: in a generic way, can someone explain how I do the client reading from a website/db in the Windows world? Is it better to have the user populating a db with the latest news, and my system tray app reading from a remote db, or should I use xml? Is this where the Web service comes in? I can figure out the specific coding if someone could help me figure out the design. Once again, I get stuck on the Windows lingo....

If you control both the web site and the system tray applicaiton, the easiest way to get information from the web site is to use a web service. The web service can then get the data from the database.

Doing this, you are still retrieving data from the web (port 80), but you dont have to mess with parsing web pages.

If you control both the web site and the system tray applicaiton, the easiest way to get information from the web site is to use a web service. The web service can then get the data from the database.

Doing this, you are still retrieving data from the web (port 80), but you dont have to mess with parsing web pages.