AIM Session Tracker Utility

• Download demo - 80.3 KB
• Download source - 95.1 KB

Introduction

This is my first CodeProject article. I've made a small AIM instant messenger session tracker utility. I took the image from here. If this is a copyright violation, please let me know.

This program polls the status of any AIM user by visiting a special link.

The Code

The essence of the program is only one line:

http://api.oscar.aol.com/presence/get?k=DEVELOPERKEY&f=xml&t=SCREENNAME1&t=SCREENNAME2...

This allows you to get the state of the AIM user - online, away, offline. Note that it is not possible to check if a user is invisible or not using this URL (although there is a way to check if a user was invisible or not after they come back online). Also, you need a developer key to use this service (you can get one here).

Since this URL returns an XML document, I processed it with XML tools from the C# library. Here's the general method I used to get each individual element; you can't copy and paste it into Visual Studio, but it should give you a general direction:

XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument();
xDoc.Load("http://api.oscar.aol.com/presence/get?k=DEVELOPERKEY&f=xml&t=SCREENNAME");
XmlNodeList Users = xDoc.GetElementsByTagName("user");  
foreach (XmlNode User in Users)
{
       string Screenname = User["displayId"].InnerText;
}

Points of Interest

I've always noticed .NET programs take up a fair chunk of memory, so I Googled 30 minutes about how to reduce .NET program memory sizes. And, I found a useful link: http://bytes.com/groups/net-c/302104-forcefully-releasing-memory.

This is how to reduce program memory size:

public static void ReduceMemoryUsage()
{
    try
    {
        Process CurrentProcess = Process.GetCurrentProcess();
        CurrentProcess.MaxWorkingSet = CurrentProcess.MinWorkingSet;
    }
    catch { }
}

Conclusion

There's not much to the code. Download and use the program as it is. The developer key in the download above is my developer key, so I would appreciate it if each of you could get your own developer key.