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Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon.

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Mayayana,

>   I agree, but it's also not common for people to write their
> own downloader.

Yep.  Most people just want "something which works".  I myself am rather 
prone to wanting to know *how* something works, and that includes trying to 
write such stuff myself.   Like, it seems, you.

> Encryption, on the other hand, is a headache. I spent a lot of
> time awhile back trying to write my own encryption routines
> for sending email,

I would not even try to do that.  I'm no maths wizz, and as such stay far 
away from it.    But if you mean if I tried to use Keberos and other OS 
available methods ?  Yep.  With stressing the "tried".  As with you it 
turned out to be *very* hard to find applicable documentation.  MSDN is 
nice, but rather often it doesn't actually help me advance codewise.

>  As with a lot of things, people offer code and help without really
> knowing the topic. Lots of people had samples for sending email
> through gmail using SSL/TLS starting on an open port.

You have ?    Hopefully not using OpenSSL, as that one, as far as I'm 
concerned, sucks donkyballs. Too many methods to open a socket, and even a 
rather usefull function which dependantly caused my program to crash. And 
after a lot of hair-pulling and some googeling it was even *documented* (of 
sorts) to do so under Windows.  :-\

> No one had samples for using STARTTLS on port 465.

In such a cases I always try to spy on the communication of a program which 
already can do it (possibly using wireshark or something like that).

I didn't even come that far though.  After I found out that *anyone* could 
send email under my name anyway (even dropped on my own ISP's email 
servers!) I concluded that trying to create an SSL connection to send my 
mail thru simply wasn't worth it.

>  I've noticed a similar pattern whenever things are difficult. [snip]

Thats sounds awfull and remarkable.   Though I cannot imagine nobody has 
ever tackled the other two ...

My own story in that regard is that I, years ago, spend a *lot* of time with 
decoding the .DBX files belonging to Outlook Express.  Found all kinds of 
data on the file format and eventually succeeded in listing its contents 
(and toggle some flags). But what I do not remember *ever* having found was 
examples using directdb.dll, which makes the whole thing a *lot* easier (and 
allows you to access those .DBX files even when outlook express is running). 
Even now a quick peek shows that the first 5(!) google result pages have 
nothing on it.

And than ofcourse the bad encounters:  Like a few months back me posting a 
simple question with all the relevant data and a code snippet in a C++ 
forum, and than getting flack because I either should not even be thinking 
of doing something like that (thats for me to decide, thankyouverymuch), 
because I didn't give data such-or-so (at which point I refer them back to 
my first post which contains it, after which ofcourse a lot of bickering 
ensues), or demands for the rest of the code so they can figure out what I'm 
*really* after (as I'm asking I simply *must* be a noob), and than work 
around the posted problem by throwing something fully different at it. 
Quite a self-righteous lot, often not having a clue to what the answer is 
(or even might be), but thinking that with enough bullshitting around it I 
will not notice that. :-((

>  You may already have ZLib code.

I do, and have succesfully transposed a number of such code examples to my 
own favorite language (Assembly).  But thanks. I (almost) never turn down a 
link to a page with possibly interresting stuff like that (even though I've 
not written any VB since a decade-and-a-half ago ...)

> You can't just hand zlib a file.

You .. can't ... ? :-p   "(un)compress" comes quite close to it though.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser


-- Origional message:
"Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> wrote in message 
news:orntk0$kae$1@gioia.aioe.org...
> "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> wrote
>
> | No, it doesn't really make sense to me -- no matter in which language
> you're
> | using the object -- not to include support for the known types of
> | compression. You always use them.
> |
>   I agree, but it's also not common for people
> to write their own downloader. For me personally
> winhttp is perfect because I have the zlib code
> and it's not a problem to add decompression
> functionality. Encryption, on the other hand, is
> a headache. I spent a lot of time awhile back
> trying to write my own encryption routines for
> sending email, using one of a number of options.
> I couldn't get TLS to work, couldn't find clear
> docs, and couldn't find anyone who seemed to
> know what they were talking about. (I haven't
> even looked at http encryption.)
>
>  As with a lot of things, people offer code and help
> without really knowing the topic. Lots of people
> had samples for sending email through gmail using
> SSL/TLS starting on an open port. No one had
> samples for using STARTTLS on port 465. The former
> negotiates a transition to encryption. The latter
> starts encrypted. Most people didn't understand
> the difference. ("Why do you need to use anything
> other than gmail?") I finally gave up. So it was a big
> relief to find that winhttp could wrap encryption
> for me.
>
>  I've noticed a similar pattern whenever things are
> difficult. At one point I wrote VB6 code to handle the
> CDECL calls in cabinet.dll, so that I could work with
> CAB files. VB experts had been offering CAB code for
> years. VB Programmers Journal even had an article
> about it once. In all cases the code was calling
> SetupIterateCabinet from setupapi.dll, because VB
> could make that call easily. But that could only access
> one of 3 types of CAB file! So it was essentially useless.
> But no one seemed to know that, including the VB6
> experts.
>
>  You may already have ZLib code. If not and you
> want to add that to your project, I have a sample
> here:
>
> www.jsware.net/jsware/vbcode.php5#zlib
>
>  It's easy to use, but takes a little setup because
> it deals with byte strings. You can't just hand zlib
> a file.
>
> 

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Thread

Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> - 2017-10-11 13:54 +0200
  Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> - 2017-10-11 09:11 -0400
    Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> - 2017-10-11 17:45 +0200
      Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> - 2017-10-11 18:24 +0200
        Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> - 2017-10-11 12:39 -0400
          Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> - 2017-10-11 18:59 +0200
            Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> - 2017-10-11 14:53 -0400
              Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> - 2017-10-11 22:22 +0200
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> - 2017-10-11 17:45 -0400
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> - 2017-10-12 09:25 +0200
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> - 2017-10-12 10:17 -0400
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> - 2017-10-12 19:19 +0200
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> - 2017-10-12 14:17 -0400
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> - 2017-10-12 23:09 +0200
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> - 2017-10-13 12:28 -0400
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> - 2017-10-13 14:26 -0400
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam> - 2017-10-13 18:23 -0400
                Re: Cannot get VBS to retrieve a webpage using HTTPS .. spoke too soon. "R.Wieser" <address@not.available> - 2017-10-14 09:54 +0200

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