How to communicate a Web Application to Window Application

Hi! I am developing a Web Application that will somewhat talk to a Window Application. As of now, the alternate solution I made was:
1. The web application will create a file "c:\myFile.txt"
2. The window app will always check if there is such existing file.
3. If the window app found the "myFile.txt", it will read the content and delete it.

but for me, thats not good... I would want it to be in way like using Winsock. the web app will communicate with the window app without creating a file. But HOW? What method will i use?
I am not very familiar with SOAP, but can SOAP do that? HOW?

I will really appreaciate if you can give me a sample code.

Thanks in advance!

Please email me @ [email protected]

Some specifics of this web application would have helped but in general. If you want to pull data from the web and use it in a windows application, you'd typically do so through a web service web method.

This is the approach used in Microsoft's Smart Client architecture (start here for more information http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclient/).

The approach is simple enough, you create a web service and define web methods that allow you to post and retrieve data from the service. You can consume the web services in a windows application by adding refereces to the web service to the windows application and writing the necessary code to interact with the service and methods. A full description of the process is a little more than I can write into this response.