A lot of people using or developing third-party clients connecting to the .NET Messenger Service have started getting error 401 Unauthorized during the Passport authentication process. It appears that from April 1st 2006, Passport 3 has started replacing Passport 2.
There is a pretty simple fix to this, you just need to change the way your code authenticates, the new Passport 3 methods involves a simple SOAP request, some nice folks quickly documented it at MSNPiki. There are also some implementations at the bottom for C#, Java, Perl and PHP.
At the start of January, Todd Biggs responded to a question at the MSDN forums about third party clients which connect to the .NET Messenger Service. He explains that there is only one client which is licensed to connect to the network, the Reuters Messaging client. Additionally, there are various ISV programs and services, ie. bots.
Although this really just tells us about the licensing information we already know, many people ask about it and here is the answer again. My question is, if you use or create and unlicensed client, what’s going to happen? Nothing has happened in the 2+ years since the licensing was introduced.
The terms of service states the following under section 3:
You may only use Microsoft software or authorized third-party software to sign into and use the Service. You can find a list of authorized third-party software at http://messenger.msn.com/Help/Authorized.aspx.
And under section 13:
Unless you, or a third party on your behalf, have a separate written contract with Microsoft that modifies this contract, then we may terminate or suspend your Service at any time.
My interpretation of this is that if you use a third party client, Microsoft reserve the right to block you from connecting to the service, which I have never heard of happening.
From today, Conversagent, an authorized company behind various bots on the .NET Messenger Service network is offering free licenses for their BuddyScript SDK for at least six months.
Features that are available with this offer include:
- No RL (reverse list) limit allowing unlimited users
- Usage of up to 50,000 sessions per month
- Full support for MSN Activity features
- Sample Activity enabled bot project included in SDK
In my opinion, it is about time we see something like this happen and I am really happy with what’s being offered. BuddyScript looks to be a very good bot platform and it saves a lot of unnecessary development if you were coding something from scratch.
Todd Biggs has posted about it with some suggestions as to the kind of bots you could create, check it out!
MSNMX is a PHP5 MSN Protocol Framework; however, it is currently leaning more towards a bot-type application. As the near-future comes you will see features being removed and stored separately from the Framework itself, this will give you the ability to make it do as you wish - MSN Web-based Client, Bot, Party-Line, HTTP Webcam Streamer!? It’s all possible 
MSNPAuth is a PHP class used for authentication when connecting to .NET Messenger Service, you simply pass it the Passport address, the password and the challenge string received in the USR command and it connects to the Passport authentication system to fetch authentication key.
Continue reading ‘MSNPAuth: Authenticating in PHP’
