Developing MSN plugins

While thinking of what features to put on to Stickies.NET 2005, the idea of sending Stickies over MSN Messenger came to mind and I think it would be great.

So the first thing I've tried to figure out is, getting the SDK for Messenger. And after a few hours of findings, I figured out that all the forums and articles are talking about a class called "MessengerAPI", which I tried to get advice from Dr.Google with "MessengerAPI download", I've no luck.

And after going thru some frustration, I've got some light from one of the forum post, which uses RCW to the unmanaged messenger API. What a big mistake I've made/overlooked! That's probably because I'm not a VB6 programmer ever.

And finally I've managed to get it working to hook on some events of the MSN Messenger. However, out of all the events, there isn't an event that will raise when message text was received and sent. I guess that probably to prevent all sorts of MSN bots to flood the network.

So, my research went on and I've explore to another new arena that I wasn't familiar with before and that's the unmanged APIs. Apparently, you have to deal with unmanged Win32 API, in sending messages to the Window (and to its TextBox Control). It was painful as I've to do more reading on this to get it working, and so far my program doesn't work, which I guess I've got the wrong control ID for the textbox and button.

There are some the useful bookmarks that I've been reading over the night, until 1am!

COM Interop: Messenger Auto-Responder
http://www.devhood.com/tutorials/tutorial_details.aspx?tutorial_id=213

DotMSN - .NET Messenger libraray
http://www.xihsolutions.net/dotmsn/

sanx.org :: Tweaks for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista
http://www.sanx.org/tipShow.asp?index=276

regards,
choongseng