The first annual "Geoff's too lazy to code" competition.
Hello.
Do you get sick and tired of chasing GMail accounts? Once you get one, then all your friends want one, and of course, you never actually get any invites for yourself?
Do you get sick and tired of writing all that boring, easy, powerful, .net code in the language of your choice? Do you miss the good old days of C++ or VB6?
Well have i got a deal for you!
I've got 6 invites to give away. Yes, that's right, 6!
What's the catch? No catch. I will give one person all 6 invites. That's right! Just contact me with your list of six names and addresses to send them to, and I will personally send them out!
Ok, so there IS a catch.
It's too easy just to give them away one at a time. I just want to get rid of them. So someone can have all 6. But you have to prove your worthiness.
So I thought of this competition. I want a decent coder to inherit this lucky prize. So here's the scoop.
Write for me some that does the following:
a) Receives a http URL as an input.
2) Returns a string as an output.
iii) The string stated in 2) is to be the content of the file downloaded in a).
The trick here is that it:
i) Automatically discovers if a proxy host is in use (this includes all options via setting it in IE - specific host, auto detect, a proxy.pac file, or none) and retrieves it successfully using the correct proxy.
b) It MUST be either COM or standard Win32 callable. That is, I want to be able to call it from VB6 - there is NO .net framework allowed!
3) I just want the source. To do the actual retrieval, using some other object like XMLHttp, ServerXMLHttp, or somethign built in to windows or VB6 is ok. But you MUST be able to work out the proxy.
Any takers? Go on, show me what you can do!
If you can't do it, but can find me a free/cheap third party solution or source example, then I might consider that a good enough entry. In fact, i'll probably kiss your dog, because i can't find anything good enough.
Let the games begin!
Edit: Seems I forgot something important. It has to be windowless. No embedded invisible IE's allowed, because there is no way of reliably intercepting all popups that IE could throw up (and believe me, i know!)
Listening to: disenchanted lullaby - foo fighters - (4:35)