C# Bot Making E Book
- Thread starter sam2009
- Start date
mmwus
Registered Member
- Nov 17, 2007
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Virustotal Report is good: http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/...34d188b6400f3800fa76023d38426ec442-1250580723
seeplusplus
Power Member
- Aug 18, 2008
- 525
- 179
Thanks for the share, book will be real interesting. Going to give creating one a go.
Lord Crash
Newbie
- Dec 19, 2009
- 4
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THX, very nice book with a lot of good examples.
An ebook, no matter how good, is not going to teach how to really engineer a good bot. You may be able to get some stuff working, no doubt. But a book is only a beginning. Coding, and even more so, the actual engineering side of the application is hard work that you dont come by in any easy way. If someone promises you that you can, they are a liar.
smack
Junior Member
- Feb 1, 2010
- 182
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it's very hard if you want to do it right. it all depends on what level of functionality/reliability that you want to achieve. sure just about anyone can slap something together with a webbrowser control but it will won't hold a candle to a piece of software, similar in concept, that uses the sockets namespace. of course there are many shades in between, so once you identify that you have a base for how challenging your implementation will be.
i read through all the ebooks in this pack yesterday. i guess if you have absolutely no idea what you're doing they could be helpful but really if you want to build a powerful/reliable bot there are a lot more details that go in to it.
the examples in the c# pdf leverage HTTPWebRequest for the most part, this is a good middle of the road functionality to begin with. it will teach you some of the basic concepts of dealing with website interaction such as page parsing, without having to worry about a lot of the craziness associated with doing a custom HTTP class implementation.
that being said i don't advocate the use of HTTPWebRequest for any serious bot building. while it provides a good starting point to understand the concepts involved it is clunky to work with, a pig as far as memory goes in relation to other options, and not nearly as solid/reliable as it should be.
the book in the "read first" zip dedicated to php and curl made me chuckle. i've known for a while a while, but never fully understand why, people build bots in php. seeing the code examples in that pdf suggest to me that using a scripting language to create something like a bot is really just making it harder on yourself in many ways.
what it all comes down to is how good you want your program to be. most of my time developing a bot is spent researching, testing, debugging, and fine tuning the interaction of all the connected code systems. actually writing the code generally takes a good bit less time than that. maybe a little erroneous because it could be argued that those are multiple steps as opposed to a single step but in my opinion the architecture and engineering aspects of putting together a program are as, if not more important than most of the sub level code.
another point to keep in mind is that every method is different and requires its own specific nuances to make it successful. i would think about these books as more of a "Bots 101" than anything else. so while i wouldn't ignore what they have to say, i would take them with a grain of salt and the knowledge that there are better techniques out there.
xLoKuMx
Junior Member
- Jun 24, 2009
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- Jan 8, 2010
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@smack, I do agree with you on the way MS has coded httpwebrequest class, its way too bulky and is full of bugs, even in the framework 3.5.
I have been struggling to code a FB bot with it for past 2 weeks, While am able to login successfully, it logs me out each time I do something after logging in, lets say adding a friend. After breaking my head over the code for 2 weeks and asking in forums for help, I finally discovered it was not my code, but the stupid way in which MS has coded cookie management in httpwebrequest class. I finally was able to override it and make my code work but Iam still not happy with httpwerequest since its full of bugs.
Do you have any alternate solution/suggestion to this?
I have been struggling to code a FB bot with it for past 2 weeks, While am able to login successfully, it logs me out each time I do something after logging in, lets say adding a friend. After breaking my head over the code for 2 weeks and asking in forums for help, I finally discovered it was not my code, but the stupid way in which MS has coded cookie management in httpwebrequest class. I finally was able to override it and make my code work but Iam still not happy with httpwerequest since its full of bugs.
Do you have any alternate solution/suggestion to this?
smack
Junior Member
- Feb 1, 2010
- 182
- 80
there are many different options outside of httpwebrequest. the most powerful being the sockets namespace. it takes time to learn and there is quite a bit there (i still don't have my head entirely around it), but for the long term it is really something worth learning if you plan on making powerful bots over the long term. it provides a large amount of functionality and flexibility (mline has created some outright magic using that namespace).
i have personally run in to some cookie issues a long, long time ago when using httpwebrequest, mainly related to it's handling of cookie domains and secure cookies. there were also some problems i experienced with the webrequest class rejecting ssl certificates as being invalid. the resolution that i ended up having to use was creating a "dummy" delegate to override the rejection of the certificate. what a pain.
there are also third party http classes like chillkat that you can purchase. i can't vouch for them personally since i have never needed to use them, but i have seen quite a few people people praising them.
here are some links to get you started with sockets should you decide to go that route:
Code:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.sockets%28VS.71%29.aspx
http://www.developerfusion.com/article/3918/socket-programming-in-c-part-1/2/good luck.