I need front ends to be able to pass information between each other.  The
front ends can obviously save information into a common BE but each FE needs
to know that there's information waiting for it.  So I need a way to trigger
an event on an application on another machine.
I've come up with 2 options so far:

i) a hidden timer form checks a table for messages adressed to itself.  I
don't like this idea at all.  It's a bodge and if nothing else will mess up
step-by-step debugging!

ii) some kind of network messaging service via winsock or something.  I see
winsock has an event for the receipt of data.  This is my preferred of the
two but the problem here is I've never done any winsock programming in my
life and I'll need to worry about ports and firewalls and such like.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? Or good examples of winsock?

Thanks,
   Andrew