Hallo Experts,
First of, let me explain what my target is. For years already I've been a webmaster and I've deepened myself mostly into PHP. The site I owned was a games site, and eventually I had a small online game. It was basically a text-based game, but decorated with some images and a nice look. It worked like a charm and was more popular than I ever thought it would be. The major disadvantage of it was, because of constant refreshing, it sucked up a lot of bandwidth and caused a heavy load in the server.
Now, a year later, I got a whole new game planned out, but I want a different approach this time. Instead of having the game webbased, I want it to be an actual program I made in Visual Basic.
However, I came accross a problem I'd probably have on most servers nowadays; the MySQL database doesn't allow usage outside of the server itself, basically only making it possible to use the MySQL database with scripts on the actual server itself. So, a Visual Basic program interacting with my database was not possible.
Today, someone mentioned that it was possible to let a webpage display a string, and then letting a Visual Basic program read that string, so I can use it in the program afterwards. For example, take this page:
http://www.tuvai.com/W_unixtime.phpThe page I posted above does nothing else than displaying a UNIX timestamp (10-number long integer). Now, for starters, I want a simple Visual Basic application to read the value outputted on that page, and that's where we get to my actual question: How do I do that?
I'm still pretty new at Visual Basic. I have worked with ADO, DAO/MDac and a bunch of standard controls (IE webbrowser control, flexchart control, etcetera) but I got absolutely no clue how I would have my program read a string outputted by a webpage. Who can help me out on this one?
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