Shoutbox

Hello everyone,

one day has passed since my last post about code sharing and I've now cooled-down a little (mostly because some of the people, who posted the original threads I was complaining about, publicly made fools of themselves by insisting on empty/bogus arguments). I would have liked to continue this discussion on MSN Fanatic as this is about development but I don't want some of their users to continue to spit on me for no reason while I'm asking for opinions. If you have contacts on MSN Fanatic that you know will be interested by this topic, please ask them to reply here, that way, we'll be sure to have a nice, clean debate (everybody has the right to say bad things about me, but nicely, without sarcasm and with a smile ). I have absolutely nothing against the MSN Fanatic community so if the situation gets better there, I'll probably move this thread to their forum (I'll do it when I'll be sure that some of their users won't spoil the whole idea because of their "opinion" about me).

If you followed the "code-sharing" thread on MSN Fanatic at the beginning of the month, you've seen that I was asking for the opinion of developers and I got it. Some people wanted tutorials, some people wanted a multi-function DLL. The thread was concluded by people complaining that I was not replying fast enough and that waiting for an eventual compromise was just an excuse (which lead to my post yesterday in the News section). Well, I'm ok with deciding by myself with what I think is best for the community so here is the result of my thoughts on the matter.

About the multi-function DLL, I don't think it's a good idea. It would never have enough functions to satisfy everyone. As for tutorials, again, it's a problem because a lot of people would expect full-functional code they can copy/past while the original intent is to share knowledge, not help every developer to make his own little hack tool.

What's my idea then? well, that may sound kinda strange but if you read the rest of my post, it will help you understand it. My suggestion is simple: to release the full source code of Messenger Plus! 1.42 (the latest release in the 1.x series). When I got the idea, I thought this would probably be the best thing for several reasons: within the code, you'll find a lot of valuable information about Messenger inner workings as long as the proper hooking techniques to hook in the Messenger process safely and efficiently. However, Messenger Plus! 1.42 not being compatible with Messenger 6, it will prevent people to use its code directly to do their own tool and that's very important. In short, what I'm saying is that Messenger Plus! 1.42 is too old to be used in today's Messenger versions as-is (it does work wonderfully with Windows Messenger 4.x though) but it's still full of the early techniques I developed when I was experimenting with MSN Messenger. Messenger Plus! 2.x was recreated from scratch but the basic hooking techniques stayed almost identical as they were perfected from version 1.00 to version 1.40.

As you can see, this is a big suggestion and I'm very serious about it. I need your feedback about that (developers only please) and I'll gladly answer to any question you may have about the project (this thread is there for that reason). The code of Messenger Plus! 1.42 is mostly in Language C (there is not much C++ in Messenger Plus! 1.x because at that time, I was rewriting the same code again and again while I was learning better techniques and hooking is not very suited for object oriented programming). If we conclude that this is the good way to go, I'll have to do some clean up, translate all my french comments in english, add as much new comments as possible to document the important parts, ... (it will take me more than a couple of days to do that, please remember it if you feel like creating a thread about the delay ).

Again, I can't insist enough on the fact that without your feedback, nothing will happen. This is a community thing so there's no point in me doing it alone.

I'm looking forward to see what you all have to say about this,
Patchou