Two Person Chat With The Winsock Control And Visual Basic - Conclusion

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One of the reasons Visual Basic is so popular is because of the way it gives us access to libraries and controls so easily. In this example, you've seen how easy it is to setup a complete chat application using the Winsock ActiveX control.

If you're interested in Winsock, then you can take our chat application and give it added functionality. Here are some ideas that you may want to try and implement:

• Playing Sounds: Let users click a button to play a sound in the other users chat application. The easiest way to do this is to send a message such as "<< PLAY SOUND LAUGH.WAV>>" to the other computer. When that computer receives this message, it should extract the name of the file from the message (laugh.wav) and use the windows media control to play that sound.
• Sending Files: A more difficult idea would be to allow users to swap files with each other. To do this, you'll want to break up the file and send it in chunks. You'll need to prepend the send with some sort of header block such as "<< INCOMING FILE myfile.txt >>", so that the receiving computer knows a file is on its way. Once the entire file has been sent, use a closing block to tell the receiving computer that the file send is complete.
• Save Messages: Just like ICQ, you might want to experiment with saving messages into a users history area. You could use a flat file or a simple access database and ADO to do this. For a database, simply create three fields: messageId, message, and author. Whenever the send button is clicked, you would use an "INSERT INTO ..." command to add a new record to the database. Add a button to the chat application called history. Whenever the user clicks on it, use a "SELECT * FROM Messages WHERE author = ..." SQL query to retrieve each message in that users history.

Please take a look at some of the links and books below for more information on Winsock and network/internet programming.

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Comments On: Two Person Chat With The Winsock Control And Visual Basic

· You say you can download it @ the last page ...No download or what so ever    · dude the point of coding isn't to just download people's full program then change...    · LIAR...On the first page of the tut, you SAID that the download is at the last page....    · You are right loozahhh..patience is the point..    · I apologize for sounding like an anonymous loozah, but I am having some issues with...    · the code:additemdosent work. is there any declarations for it or sumthin plz...    · nvm i figured it out but i cant get the other ppl to see that i disconnected, have a...    · How Did you fix? @person above me    · like A chat with B in one window , and chat with C in other indow??    · you say that "To use our chat application, simply download the support material from...   >>> Post your comment now!