Projects

TheInky.com

This website was written using PHP and the Zend Framework, and uses the Smarty template engine for .. well, the templates. To design the website I used Photoshop CS3, and to write the code, templates, CSS and what not, I used Visual Studio 2005 using the Vs.PHP add-in.

The blog of this website is actually a mirror of my blog on Windows Live Spaces. It grabs the 5 most current posts from my weblog using the metaWeblog.getRecentPosts function over XML-RPC. The comments are actually extracted from the RSS feed for the specified post, and are combined with the specific post which is retrieved using the metaWeblog.getPost function.

MessengerClient.dll

The latest Windows Live Messenger clients have support for add-ins. Although the support was officially dropped (I believe for the first time in the v8.1 or v8.5 client), the feature is still available, even in the latest 9.0 beta client. Unfortunately, the add-ins have some serious restrictions, such as not being to include third party DLLs, access the web, use P/Invoke, etc. To counter this I extracted the source from the original MessengerClient.dll file (using .NET Reflector) and removed the piece of code that is responsible for the restrictions.

Simply compile the source and replace the DLL in the Messenger folder (either "Program Files\MSN Messenger" or "Program Files\Windows Live\Messenger"). Even though the official DLL is signed by Microsoft, Messenger will load it anyway!

• Download source for MessengerClient.dll (C# source)

Windows Live / MSN Games Launcher

This simple website lets you launch any game or activity available for Windows Live and MSN Messenger. Even if your account is set to English, for example, you will still be able to launch games from different locales, such as French, German, etc.! Simply select the language from the dropdown box, pick a game and start playing!

Initially written in Perl, I have now rewritten it in PHP to integrate it with this website. The "application" accesses the official XML "webservice" to query the content servers for the available games per language. This means it is always up to date! It also tries to give you as much information about the game as possible; whether it uses file transfers, needs your IP, uses ActiveX, how many players can play it simultaneously, etc.

• View the games launcher
• Download source for the Games Launcher (PHP source, requires Zend Framework)