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astromex

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How does "whois" work?

I have written a domain search facility in VB6, but its very slow an can sometimes be innacurate.
It works by resolving the IP address from a hostname, which in theory I thought should work fine.

I have seen script examples on the net for doing this (in ASP, etc) but these are no good as they use things like winhttp, or xmlhttp. and all the examples I have seen send a query off to a TLD provider but the URL is no longer supported.

I realise I can buy various 3rd party DLLs to perform my domain searches, but then I cannot see whats "under the bonnet" to determine if their methods are future-proof. Besides I figure it can be that hard and what to be able to support it myself as well as learn something new.

So is there a simple way of doing this, like checking a DNS server or something - something garranteed to work.
And is there any "whois" source-code out there for VB6.
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jamie37
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neteducation

I personally am using checkdomain.com
It's been in business for I dont know how many years aready and is rocksolid. It queeries the different whois-servers in the background. so you can take oe of your examples using winhttp and use the checkdomain-site
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Thanks, I need some time to check out all these leads. I'll get back soon.
I have been playing with a lot of code from the links provided by jamie37 and Mike_Carroll, but the only examples I can get to work use mswinsck.ocx.
I have made a dll wich works fine on my workstatiuon but my server does not have mswinsck.ocx. I assume this is not shipped with windows, but was installed when I setup visual studio.
Is this right or is there a different version of winsock that ships with windows?
Winsock ships with Windows, but that particular control probably does not.  Check MSDN to see if it's a redistributable.
Thanks. I found all the answers helpful so I cant say that any particular answer solved my problem - hence the point split.