March 8, 2002 tools

.NET IM Client Classes

Inspired by my need to know who was calling without hauling my butt off the couch to look at the caller ID on the phone across the room (my father always said that laziness is the mother of invention”), I built a couple of C# classes for managing an IM connection and an IM session. The test client is a console application that just sends messages and dumps whatever it gets from the IM server to the console, but I think it would serve as the code is the beginnings of a real IM client. It does the MD5 stuff properly and handles being redirected to another IM server, so the hard part of the protocol is already implemented. The sample itself is a handy little program that logs in as an IM user, sends a message to another IM user and logs back off again. Perfect for annoying your office mates. Enjoy.

BTW, Harry Pierson has made a number of updates to this core code to support his full-blown  .NET IM client application. Check it out!