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dotMSN
By Bas Geertsema
dotMSN is a class library to make use of the MSN Messenger Service.
The library is built in C# and can therefore be used by all languages the .NET environment supports. The library is easy to use because of a clean object oriented approach which is offered by a modern language like C#.
You can use this library for example to create MSN bots or for use in already existing applications who need to communicate through the Messenger service.
The library currently supports:
- Connecting / disconnecting with the MSN Messenger service.
- Fires events when contact go online or offline or change status
- Automatically synchronizes contact lists and keep contact data up to date
- Create/Remove contactgroups
- Convenient enumerating through contacts in different lists
- Request or receive conversations
- Multiple users in one conversation
- Send messages
- Received messages include information about font, charset, color, decoration
- Privacy settings of the contactlist owner
- Provides hotmail inbox status
- Error handling
There are still some things yet to be implemented:
- Notify of new incoming e-mail messages
- File transfer
- Owner profile
- Bugfixes probably
dotMSN is not yet open-source. As i don't know what to do with it yet. The documentation will answer most of your questions anyway.
Documentation
The documentation can be found here
Download
The latest version is 0.8.1053beta. You can download it here. This is the DLL simply reference this dll and you will be able to use dotMSN (use namespace 'DotMSN'). Since this is my first release be aware of bugs and other flaws you come across. Please send these errors to me (orphix@planet.nl). Ofcourse i'm also available for suggestions.
A simple example explaining how to use this library is also available.
dotMSN 0.8.1053beta
dotMSN Example
Resources
My two main resources about the protocol are:
http://www.hypothetic.org/docs/msn/index.php
http://www.venkydude.com/articles/msn.htm
I would like to thank the authors (Mike Mintz and venky_dude) of these documents for reverse-engineering the protocol.
About the author
My name is Bas Geertsema and you can contact me at: orphix@planet.nl
Projects
Recently Chad Myers from www.anetforums.com has implemented a thread-reply notification in their forum software using dotMSN.
If you are using dotMSN for a public project, please let me know!
Changelog
19 Nov 2002:
- Changed IP adress from messenger server: 64.4.13.58 to 64.4.13.17. This caused problems logging in. You can now specify your own server (if necessary) using the MessengerServer property.
Furthermore I would like to thank the people who give me feedback about dotMSN, great job and let me know what cool things you make using dotMSN :)
31 Sep 2002:
- ContactOffline event will now work correctly
28 Jul 2002:
- Fixed RequestConversation(). Due to some last-minute changes the messaging only worked one way around. This should be solved now.
- Added 'ClientData' field to multiple classes. This provides more interaction with the client programmer
- Fixed status change problems.
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