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Introduction

Many mobile telephone operators now offer SMS (short messaging service) facilities on their Web sites. Often, however, these facilities require a slow and tedious logon procedure, and once there the recipient and message must be laboriously typed into a Web form, which in itself requires downloading several pages.

Orange UK's Web site is one such offender. The SMS service (which is only available to send to Orange users) is difficult to find, and slow to load. WebMessage offers a streamlined interface to Orange SMS - and provides a useful example of Outlook linking and Web client development, too.

Before using WebMessage, you should have an account with Orange UK.

WebMessage will load contacts from Outlook. You will need Outlook 97 or better. The contacts are displayed either as their nickname (if present) or as their 'File As' name.

When you click OK, the message you write will be sent to the number you specify.

WebMessage Code Notes

WebMessage is implemented as a 'dialog-based MFC application'. You will need an MFC-compatible compiler (either Borland C++ 5 (retail version) or Microsoft Visual C++ 5 or better).

You can view the main source file here: WebMessageDlg.cpp, and download a Zip file of the source code, including all the resources and a Microsoft Visual C++ project you can use to build the program.

Things to note:

ClassWizard was used to generate the Outlook interface files.

The dialog box contains a standard status bar, which is created at run-time.

Outlook is loaded using standard COM tricks, which will look for an existing Outlook object before creating a new one.

The message is sent using the Win32 Internet APIs, illustrating the process of sending POST queries over HTTP, and receiving data.

It should be fairly easy to adapt the code to use other companies' Web-based SMS.

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