This blog serves as a place for me where I can occasionally dump bits of content from my brain. Feel free to browse.

HA Computer Dictionary

HA Computer Dictionary is a comprehensive dictionary of about 10,000 computer related terms and abbreviations. The dictionary includes terms drawn from a wide variety of topics relevant to computer users, including software, hardware, networking and so on.

You can download this software from Download.com. Here is the link:
http://download.cnet.com/HA-Computer-Dictionary/3000-2051_4-10885269.html


Bomberman Game

Here is a very nice and clone of classic old game: Bomberman. I developed this game about two years ago, but I just remembered it today so thought to post it on my blog. This was my first real application in VB.NET.

Download the Game
Download Source Code

Note: This game requires .NET Framework to be installed on your computer in order to run.


Login to website using VB.NET

The example below uses HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse classes to log in to Facebook.

Dim cookieJar As New Net.CookieContainer()
Dim request As Net.HttpWebRequest
Dim response As Net.HttpWebResponse
Dim strURL As String
 
Try
     'Get Cookies
     strURL = "https://login.facebook.com/login.php"
     request = Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(strURL)
     request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3"
     request.Method = "GET"
     request.CookieContainer = cookieJar
     response = request.GetResponse()
 
     For Each tempCookie As Net.Cookie In response.Cookies
            cookieJar.Add(tempCookie)
     Next
 
     'Send the post data now
     request = Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(strURL)
     request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3"
     request.Method = "POST"
     request.AllowAutoRedirect = True
     request.CookieContainer = cookieJar
 
     Dim writer As StreamWriter = New StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream())
     writer.Write("email=username&pass=password")
     writer.Close()
     response = request.GetResponse()
 
     'Get the data from the page
     Dim stream As StreamReader = New StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream())
     Dim data As String = stream.ReadToEnd()
     response.Close()
 
     If data.Contains("<title>Facebook") = True Then
            'LOGGED IN SUCCESSFULLY
     End If
 
Catch ex As Exception
     MsgBox(ex.Message)
End Try

Now, here is some explanation:

Get Cookies

The following block of code gets all the cookies from Facebook and stores them in a collection. These cookies are returned upon visiting the webpage: https://login.facebook.com/login.php. Getting the cookies is very important, because they must be passed back to the webpage when you are going to login.

For Each tempCookie As Net.Cookie In response.Cookies
     cookieJar.Add(tempCookie)
Next

Passing post data to the website

Next, I created a StreamWriter class and wrote the post data to it. You can pass any data to the website here in name=value&name=value format.

Dim writer As StreamWriter = New StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream())
writer.Write("email=username&pass=password")
writer.Close()

Finally…

The following code gets the source code of the webpage returned which is the homepage of your account (i.e home.php), and checks if you are logged in successfully or not.

Dim stream As StreamReader = New StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream())
Dim data As String = stream.ReadToEnd()
response.Close()
 
If data.Contains("<title>Facebook") = True Then
     'LOGGED IN SUCCESSFULLY
End If

I hope this simple example will help you save some time. If you find it useful then do let me know via your comments.

Happy Coding :)