Thread: What is wrong with this program (that uses Windows Network functions)

I can't figure out how to get this program to work. It compiles fine. It doesn't work at school or on my friends Lan at his house. The purpose of the program is to send anonymous net send messages but the functions don't seem to be doing anything and nothing happens when I run the program (stuff happens, but there is no result). I've read everything about the functions at the MSDN thing, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I've even tried manually registering the alias's with the system() function in replace of the NetMessageNameAdd() function. Here is the code (to compile it you have to link it with the netapi32 library):

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <cstring>
#include <windows.h>
#include <Lm.h>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
    
    char fromName[20];
    char computerName[20];
    char message[100];
    char fake[30];
    char completeCommand[140];
    int num;
    
    cout<<"Welcome, you are about to have the best fun of"
        <<"\nyour typing career at the expense of someone else!"<<endl;
    
    cout<<"Please enter the name of the computer you want to spam: ";
    cin.getline(computerName, 20);
    char* compConst = computerName;
    
    cout<<"Please enter the message you wish to spam with (must be below 100 chars): ";
    cin.getline(message, 100);
    
    
    cout<<"Please enter the assumed name: ";
    cin.getline(fake, 30);
    char* nameConst = fake;
    
    cout<<"Please enter the number of messages you wish to send to that alias: ";
    cin>>num;
    
    int msg = strlen(message);
    NetMessageNameAdd(NULL, LPCWSTR("RECTOR"));
    for(int i = 0; i<num; i++){
    NetMessageBufferSend(NULL,(LPCWSTR)compConst, (LPCWSTR)nameConst, (BYTE*)message, msg*2);}
    
    cout<<"Done."<<endl;
    system("PAUSE");
    return 0;
}

Any help possible would be greatly appreciated.

Well one thing to check, is to make sure the windows messenger service is running. I think it gets turned off by default when you install service pack 2. Does it work if you do the Net Send command manually?

Code:

    NetMessageBufferSend(NULL,(LPCWSTR)compConst, (LPCWSTR)nameConst, (BYTE*)message, msg*2);}

Contrary to popular belief, you can't just cast a value to get rid of a warning and hope for the best. Occasionally, this approach works but often it doesn't.

A LPCWSTR is typedefed to const wchar_t*. This means that it expects a wide unicode string.

You have two choices to get wide strings for your function call. The first and preferred method is to use wide character input methods such as wcin. The second method is to continue to retrieve input in ansi and convert it to wide as needed for function calls. This second approach is demonstrated in this NetMessageBufferSend sample, the fourth result from Google.

What header file would I find wcin in?

I can't get wcin to work. It keeps saying that wcin is undeclared.

>> I'm using Dev-C++. <<

Try defining _GLIBCPP_USE_WCHAR_T before including <iostream>. Here is a sample that should work.

Code:

#define _GLIBCPP_USE_WCHAR_T 1
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;

int main(void)
{
	/* Get a line of input in a wstring. */
	wstring input1;
	getline(wcin, input1, L'\n');

	/* Get a line of input in a c wide string. */
	wchar_t input2[512];
	wcin.getline(input2, 512);

	wcout << input1 << endl << input2 << endl;

	wcin.get();
}

>> It almost looks as if the information need by NetMessageBufferSend is being passed in to the program as parameters. Is this true? <<

Yes. It uses command line arguments from the argv array. It would have been better to use CommandLineToArgvW to retrieve the command line arguments in unicode format, rather than converting the ansi version.

Thanks.