Public Class GeoffAppleby

Proxy support (and lack of)

So who's written apps that require some sort of request over the internet?

OK, of those people, who actually stopped to consider the fact that some people use proxies?

Right, now of those people, who actually took the time to think of the fact that most users don't actually know what a proxy is? Or that in many business setups, the users are stuck with a proxy.pac file?

Right, of the 2 of you left, how did you go about implementing proxy support?

It seems that many MS provided libraries have very poor proxy support. I'm currently working on an IE toolbar that downloads an RSS feed and scrolls the latest news headlines to the user.

To get this feed, i need to contact a website to get it, but I can't use IE to get it for me, because it interrupts the user experience.

So i'm using MSXML to get it for me - perfect, you would think - especially since RSS is XML, except that it's proxy support is pretty limited. For XmlHTTP, you can use a proxy, but only if it's preset in the proxy store for it. For ServerXmlHTTP, you can specify the proxy host in the call.

So how do i go about getting the proxy information without interrupting the end user at some point? I'd like to get the information from IE, since it _should_ already know it. I can get a set proxy host from the registry - easy. I can find out if they have a proxy.pac file set - easy.

I haven't figured out yet how to tell if they have 'auto detect' ticked. Anyone know the reg entry for that?

If they do have a proxy.pac file set, do i really want to go to the effort of parsing it?

So, does anyone happen to know of or have that can work all this out for me? This is language independant - i can mis-shape it into what i need so long as it's a relatively common language. What i'd like is a method call to _something_ (preferably something that already exists in windows) that returns to me a proxy host to use, if required.

Of course, for this project, i'm stuck in VB6 land. While if i have to prompt the user for their proxy information, i will, i'd prefer not to.