I would like to do something with my C# .NET applications that when they are started, they check with a .php site to determine if the IP address of the machine is in a MySQL database. This would be perfect for me as I have specific machines I want to allow my applications to run on, but I want to prevent the clients from just taking the executable and running it themselves.
What would I need to look into to set something like this up? The part I really have no idea about is the authentication between a .php site and a C# .NET application.