Arduino Xbee<-> PC C++ Code

Hi, I’ve tried researching this on my own but haven’t really found hard examples showing how exactly what I want to do, so I was hoping someone here could at least point me in the right direction.

I’m currently working on a senior design project in which we will be flying a quadcopter, and piloting it from a custom UI I’ve created in C++ on a PC. I really only need to transfer simple commands to the device. ( A single byte of data will do, as it will interpret the given commands). For example a value of ‘1’ would mean ‘go forward’.

Now I have the UI mostly built, except for the key component, which is actually the sending of commands, as I’m unsure of how to do this.

For reference, we are using an Arduino Mega 2560, and 2 “XBee Pro 60mW Wire Antenna - Series 1”(one on the arduino, one connected to the PC via an xBee explorer dongle). The UI was created as a simple C++ Windows Form Application in VS2010.

How would I go about establishing a connection and communication (we want to both send and receive data) to the Arduino within a C++ program?

Thanks in advance and let me know if there’s anything I should clarify, and sorry if there’s already a great resource out there, it’s just eluded me so far =/