Building an AIM Bot in .Net using boo

photo by somewhatfrank

I’ve been working on a AIM Bot using the aimcc sdk. After signing up and downloading the sdk from developer.aim.com I found the documentation for .net lacking and found just getting up and running to be a long process. Below are some of the issues I ran into.

**Application.Run()

To start with I needed to create a class which extends Control. Then add a method to start the application, at the beginning of the method call CreateControl() at the end of the method you need to call Application.Run() to setup the message loop. I’m working in boo but this should work fine in c#.

class Bot(Control):
    def Start():
        CreateControl()
        #AccSession setup to go here
        Application.Run()

PInvoke

Next pinvoke is required to creat the AccSession instance. This is in some of the SDK samples, but it wasn’t obvious looking at the java and c++ sample bots. It only calls acccore.dll, but other dll’s in the accsdk/dist/release/ are needed I’m just using the full path, but should copy the required dll’s to my project file.

    [DllImport(“C:\accsdk\dist\release\acccore.dll”, EntryPoint:“#111”, PreserveSig:false, SetLastError:true)] 
    private static def AccCreateSession(
    [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPStruct)] riid as Guid, 
    [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.IDispatch)] ref session as object) as IntPtr:
        pass

Calling the method is pretty strait forward, just pass in an object and then cast the object to a AccSession.

…
        CreateControl()  
        o as object
        AccCreateSession(typeof(IAccSession).GUID, o)
        session = o as AccSession
        …

        …
        handler = AccSessionEventHandler(BoxesImResponder())
        handler.WireSession(</em>session)
        session.ClientInfo.Property[AccClientInfoProp.AccClientInfoProp_Description] = key
        session.Identity = username
        session.SignOn(password)
        Application.Run()
        …