I've spent another hour or two going over the host side program and now have it compiling and running. I had to give up the ability to send emails to the list of users concerning passwords but that really isn't a show-stopper as far as I'm concerned.

Now that I'm reasonbaly certain that I have enough of the code to work I'll get busy assembling my own remote system. Now that the thunderstorms are starting to let up here I can devote some time to getting things going to be able to run tests on the revised software. I'm going to try working on the Skype problem and see if just using the new programming API they supply will fix the problem. I'm hoping thet they've made some internal changes that the new API will correct so I won't have to re-write the W4MQ software to solve that particular problem.

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I've spent quite some time today going over the source code for the client and server side applications of W4MQ's software. The good news is that I have all of the source code for the client side application. The bad news is that I'm missing parts of the code for the server side application. I'm trying to reach W4MQ to see if he still has the missing parts.

While the problem isn't so large that it can't be overcome it will mean that I may have to remove some non-critical features on the server side. I'm still working on determining the total extent of the problem so I don't have a list of features yet that may be on the chopping block.

The other problem is one of the age of VB6 and changes to some of the support software like Skype and Windows itself. VB6 is almost considered at the end of life stage as far as Microsoft's supportfolks are concerned.They do have Visual Basic 2008 out with VB2010 due out early next year. At present VB2008 costs about $600.00 through Amazon.com and I'm looking at what I have to do to purchase a copy to advance the IRB software beyond where it stands now.

With VB6 I should be able to get one more revision of the client software out and possibly one more server side update but at the cost of some features being removed on the server side. Beyond that I'm not certain yet how far I can take this with the software tools I have.

I'll post more here as I can find out more.

Bob N2JEU