Using the Internet Transfer Control
The Internet Transfer control, also known as the Inet control, allows you to build programs that transfer files using FTP or HTTP. This control encapsulates the HTTP and FTP protocols and makes it easy for you to add file-transfer capabilities.
You may want to use this control to upload data to the corporate mainframe from a remote site that doesn’t have a full-time network connection. Another use might be to extract data from a web page for later analysis. This would be great for tracking the status of various stocks and bonds.
One application I like is one that contacts a remote system to get the list of current files for your application and compares that list to the files on your system. Then the program downloads and installs the update files. I’m going to describe how to build this kind of application later in this chapter.