I plan to discuss a method for defining Heegaard Floer invariants for noncompact 3-manifolds. The construction is inspired by contact geometry and has several interesting immediate applications to the study of tight contact structures on noncompact 3-manifolds. In this talk, I´ll focus on one basic example and indicate how one defines a contact invariant which can be used to give an alternate proof of James Tripp´s classification of tight, minimally twisting contact structures on the open solid torus. This is joint work with John B. Etnyre and Rumen Zarev.