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May 21, 2002, 11:21am

Well, in reply to your question, I was originally going to write this secret
project in C++. I decided against doing so for two reasons.

1. I have hundreds of pages of code already written to do just about
anything with the SDK that could be easily changed to do what this
particular bot is designed for. In C++, I would have to rewrite all that
code from scratch.

2. While I've written a lot of programs using console functions in C++, I
have no knowledge of how to use the Windows API to create nice looking
forms. I should probably learn how to use it, but doing so would push the
completion of the project back beyond next week, AFTER 3.3 is released.

Plus, VB offers a lot of ease in debugging that will allow me to get a
project that doesn't necessarily rely on speed off the ground quickly. The
only problem with VB is that inheritance is not supported (I believe VB.net
supports it though), meaning that the only way I can add
application-specific reactions to SDK events is to create a "generic module"
which has a set of subroutines that are called after the class processes
events. In the AvatarAdd event, for example, the class first manages the
list of avatars (used in all applications), and then passes a reference of
the "Bot" object to a global Sub for actions taken by this specific
application. It's somewhat sloppy to have to create a "dummy module" with
just the prototypes and no implementation and then make a copy to modify
each time you want to write a bot - but it's the best VB offers, unless
someone else has a better idea how this could be implemented.

By the way, in case anyone is wondering, I plan to release all of these
classes to the public in the hopes of spurring on interesting bot
development. The code won't be compiled into a DLL - it will be released as
the original source so everyone can take a look - stay tuned :)

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