As I write more of the MSN interface, I am learning more about the protocol used by Messenger. You can see much of the low level stuff here but that is not the interesting part really. Of more interest is things like the emoticons and the picture that is seen of the other person, or of their avatar.

What happens in the background is that file objects are transferred to show these – which is why sometimes the communications is slowed if the person uses one of of the after market emoticon packs like FunWebProducts or similar. I have not worked out where nudges come from, but that is the least of my worries.

What I want to work out is how to work out if an authorisation is waiting for someone to see online status, and to accept the messages from that person. Since the program will have its own MSN account, there will be no person there to be asked if a random user should be allowed to connect. So I need to do that in code. I guess I will just have to search through the documentation. The problem is that this is all object oriented, which has made the documentation so much harder to read.

As an example I purchased a spreadsheet control a couple of years back – and it came with 10,000 pages of documentation in PDF files. These were obviously computer generated and did little more than list recursively all the possible function calls and a 10 word description of each. But there were probably only a few hundred calls, so there was a LOT of repetition. Thankfully there was a user manual which worked.