Forums Feature Suggestions mIRC .NET Support

I have become a quite involved C# programmer, and I would love to see new C# DLL support from mIRC. Someone said in an earlier post "The idea is not to make mIRC compatible with your DLLs, but to make your DLLs compatible with mIRC". Ideas have been tried, for instance, I can create a socket on the DLL, and then have it connect to a scripted socket on mIRC. The entire concept of DLLs is not only to extened mIRC's functionability, but to drastically improve performance over scripts. If mIRC was a COM server, then any .NET DLL could simply use a wraper to communicate with it, however it is not. There are simple ways to make very primitiave DLL functions work with mIRC's current support, however nothing near the functionability of C++ dlls.

The new C# (.NET) DLL support should include events (i.e. 'script' events [delegates] would be called to the DLL too), which would eliminate almost all scripting needed, so all processing would be done directly onto the DLL.

Will this feature be of use to a large ammount of users? I believe so. C# is one of the fastest growing languages, and many C++ users are finding that, despite its minimal performance difference, is a far suppior language and are migrating to .NET.

Look at the hundreds, perhaps thousands of DLLs written in C++ for mIRC, see how useful they are. With support for C# I believe we will see just as many in a short period of time as C# is an easier language to master than C++, and provides much greater interactivity with the OS without being intrusive/unstable.

Please keep this in consideration.

Thanks,

K-Dub
Owner of #Script, irc.GamesNET.NET
Owner of www.IRCScripting.net

Die .NET Die! Evil spawn of Satan!
Return to thy hell fire from which thee came!

I think that would be great!

That is as good as telling Windows to die. .NET is the way forward, use it, like it, enjoy it.

I'd prefer to beat it with a mallet, but thats just me.

that will make mIRC only scriptable by people who can code C# dll's... which is MUCH harder to learn then mIRC scripting ;-]

I think you misunderstand, Doqnach. C# DLL support would not replace mIRC scripting at all. It would simply be an expansion to mIRC's scripting language by supporting them, in the same way (plus events) that C++ DLLs are supported.

As for the people who dislike .NET: It is the future. You're using windows to run mIRC, why do you disrespect Microsoft's new technology wich drastically improves over the "hacked" version of C++ to work with windows? C++ was never designed for windows; It has gone under thousands of modifications to work with windows. C# is now a .NET (not windows) native language, which .NET supports windows 100%. The *Nix support for .NET will be out soon which will allow .NET (C#, VB.NET,Managed C++) programmers to write one program, and have it run on all platforms with no porting.

We the .NET dislikers refuse to accept a Microsoft future.

.NET means I'll have to log into my Microsoft Passport in order to boot my computer.
.NET means everyone will need a hotmail/passport account in order to download and run shareware, as authors will flock to this new method of phone-home 30 day trial crack proofing at the expense of my privacy.
.NET means Digital Rights Management. If I have a file that Microsoft or some corporate, copyright or government body doesn't agree with, Microsoft has the right to remove it from my machine. They're also working on a method that will automatically bill you for mp3s that it determines you downloaded illegally (if you don't insert the original CD to prove rights ownership).
.NET means moving another step away from standards, and into conformity.

Don't even get me started on Palladium.

So Flock... FLOCK to your .NET. While your at it, encourage people to encode their video as WMV and convert their MP3s into WMA, and for heaven's sakes(!!!) stop saving plain .TXT documents... they're totally insecure and impossible to track what computers they've been created/modified/viewed on, so they promote the authoring of illegal and seditious ideas.

See how well you survive in a proprietary world with no open standards.

- Raccoon

As of right now mIRC cannot support .NET class libs for one simple reason, its entirely impossible to call upon MANAGED code from unmanaged without REQUIRING the .NET framework so to REQUIRE a 26meg framework for a 1 megabyte program is kinda dumb (thats the only reason i can see khaled not adding it since mIRC is C++ 7.0 now) either way it prolly wont be added anytime soon for that reason when .NET is distributed as a requirement for a program EVERYONE using windows has then it would be a better time to add it since its already there. ive takin it upon myself to provide as much info on C# DLL com objects to anyone that asks as much as possible as of right now im working on a C++ bridge (that requires the framework to work) that will directly call on .NET classlibs without it being registered with the gac for com instances, this will be probably the only way to do this for the time being, as for right now use COM its easy enough to figure out ive recently distributed some apps that make it incredibly easy to register and unregister normal classlibs into the GAC if you would like this stuff hit me up on Gamesurge: irc.use.gamesurge.net on channel #script