Chat Program

My friend asked me to create a chat program with a random die roller for the purpose of playing role playing games online. Being a newbie that I am I searched the net for a solution.

I came across and ran Jason B.'s article on "Two Person Chat With The Winsock Control And Visual Basic" with some modifications of my own including and die roller and dummy proofing some of the code to prevent it from closing everytime there is an error.

But my question is, how would one go about modifying his program so that it can support more than two people? Any help would be appreciated. the project is attached if u want to take a look at it.

There are 4 types of "chat" apps:

1) Broadcasts: Thoese are the simplest to write but usually do not only work on the local networks segment. There is no server and each client simply broadcast all it's messages on a common challel for the other clients to pick up.

2) Full client-server: Each client connects to a central server and sends
all it's messages to the server wich will redirect them to the other clients
concerned. This is the most common implementation (it's the IRC modele).

3) peer-to-peer: Each client connects to one (or more) other client and
serves the same message to all connected clients. This doesn't require a
central server but each client must know the IP address of all the client it wished to connect to.

4) peer-to-peer with connection server: List the peer to peer modele but the client's initial connection is made to a central server wich will distribute the IPs to the connected clients. This is the ICQ chat modele and it works very well when a small number of clients want to talk together but when a large number of potential clients are present.

Try one the 4 approches when modifying the source.

(source from borland-winsock-comm-forums)

I have made my own chat prog. everything fine except.. i would like it handle with many chatters, so there could chat more people than just 1 to 1.. and 1 prob. more, everytime some1 closes the connection nothing shows up for the other user and if she/he presses "send" button after connection is closed, it crashes.. some error. i've done the chat prog. from th tutorial: Two Person Chat With The Winsock Control And Visual Basic
.. i hope some1 could help me!