What is the best way to get the computer name remotely based on an IP address?

Question

I have several windows machines identified by ip address. I would like to write an application that query the computers remotely and gets their name. I cannot rely on DNS because it does not provide exact results.

I heard that there is a NetBIOS API that can be used, but I am not familiar with this API.

Answer 1

PING -A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

This will try WINS and then DNS.

The NSLOOKUP command does similar, but only via DNS.