All: Are there any free solutions out there for sending text messages (SMS) via .net? (maybe a web service or something?).
EDIT
What I'm really looking for is a reference for a reputable online service that I can use for sending SMS messages. Has anyone out there used such a service, and if so, can you give me a recommendation/warning?
EDIT
(first the disclaimer: I'm not in any way associated with this company, I'm just posting back what I found, in case anyone else out there is looking)
An update: I ended up going with www.clickatel.com My work was for a technology exploration and demo project,and I could buy credits on that system cheap. In my case, I started out using their REST API. I had problems with that api (sometimes the commands would timeout). So I switched to the web service API (SOAP) It worked very well for me.
Most accept email but it is vendor specific.
Related
Some time ago, I designed an application to an exisitng system. The application allows updating some app in PDA's. It is a kind of a remote updater. It uses web service.
Before I designed the application I had read some articles about WCF - technology. Then, I found a piece of information about comparision between SOAP protocol and REST architecture. Then I understood that REST is more useful for devices such as mobile or PDA's. Because of REST requires less data than SOAP. Obviously, I read more about REST that it uses HTTP methods and I know a lot about it.
As a result, I decided to use the REST architecture and everything was good. The application is still using.
Recently, I have changed my job. There is an application which uses a web service to sending data to PDA's. The web service uses SOAP protocol. I was very surprised when I have seen it first time. In my job, nobody can't tell me about it with some reasons.
Summarizing my story, I need to know that I am right that REST is a better option for a web service when we need to connect with PDA's or both option are correct. I don't need some description between SOAP vs. REST. I would like to receive a precision answer.
I'm about to start to develop and application in C# but I realized that I haven't the enough knowledge to develop it yet :S.
The thing's that I need to find out a way to let the Web server comunicate with my application, i.e., in short, is there a way to let the web server (not the Client which is the trivial case) send a messege to a Client application?
I know that I way to solve it's to make Client applications periodically send messages to the web server but that's not what I want 'cause polling generates overhead
Sorry about my english! I'm not a native speaker.
Thanks in advance!
Generally this type of interaction is achieved with Comet or WebSockets - I'm not sure how your app will be communicating with the server, but I would bet you can do what you're trying to do using one of those.
You could implement a WCF service in your client that could listen for a connection from the server (or anything else). The server can communicate with the client as easy as calling the API.
Getting started with WCF is really easy using the wizards in VS.
Here is a link that talks about using WCF with ASP, but it can be used outside of asp as well.
It seems like you meant "push" messaging, the challenge around this is for the server to keep track of the lost of clients and manage who should recieve which message.
If you want to get it done with minimal overhead you can check out the Amazon Simple Notification Service.
SNS is a cloud-based messaging and notification service hosted and managed for you, SNS is based on a topic/subscriber model and you set it up via a few simple API calls, it is metered but quite inexpensive for the most part.
edit: For C# Libraries and frameworks to do it yourself, I am not an expert in the C# world so I think other answerers will know it better.
Disclosure: I work at amazon so I am naturally inclined to like their product
I always wondered how to make an instance chat using ajax ! Ideas !? articles ?!
Thank you .
You basically just use AJAX to "subscribe" to messages pushed by a chat server. Then the client "publishes" messages which the server pushes to any clients subscribed to that channel.
NodeJS is great for instant ajax stuff like facebooks live feed or chat (Check out this open source example).
You can also give a look at the AjaxIM project which has a chat bar like facebook and has a NodeJS server and a PHP server (I suppose you could port that over to ASP.Net). I'd reccomend going with the NodeJS server and just use the javascript library to connect to it from your project.
A friend of mine released a project for helping to write the backend of such a feature, it's called the LiveChat Starter Kit and is available on CodePlex. I never tried it so can't comment on its use, but it have gathered some attention there. I think it's more curtailed to commercial websites for providing online support tough.
All that happens is that the javascript on the client uses ajax to send outgoing chat to the server, and the server uses ajax to send incoming chat to the client.
Of course there are a lot of different pieces involved but if you have questions about those, you should ask them.
I would suggest to use XMPP as it an open standard and quite a few implementations also available, following are some links which may help:
Ajax jabber/XMPP client recommendations (real experience only please) !
http://xmpp.org/
http://www.jabber.org/
I want to write an app that sends an SMS to users, and when the recipients texts back, I receive that response, including the originating phone number, and my program can react to that response.
I've googled "Interactive SMS" but didn't find anything that was clearly a fit. Has anyone else done this, got any recommendations for a paid service that provides this kind of functionality?
Alternatively, do you have any other recommendations for how to build this service into my app, which will probably be written in C#?
Find an SMS service provider that gives you an API you can use (e.g. an HTTP API). Then read their documentation.
You need to learn about SMPP (short message peer to peer) protocol. Is the protocol usually used to communicate with carrier's SMSC (Short Message Service Center). Here's a blog entry summarizing the actual status of some C# SMPP libraries. If you don't want to use an existing .NET library, you can always write your own. SMPP is not a very complex protocol after all.
An alternative might be attach your application to a cell phone, and if that cell phone provides you with an API, use it to send and receive texts. The problem here is that it won't scale if your application expects to send and receive hundreds of thousands of text messages per day.
Yet another alternative will be to use a CARRIER AGGREGATOR company that provides you with an API for your application. There are some out there, but I don't know if they will be able to offer you a short code and the possibility to receive texts in your application. Depending on the market you are targeting, you should do a little bit of research on how other VAS companies do it over there.
You can use the TextMarks API for this. It's REST-based and super simple to use. So simple that Harvard uses it to teach new students how to use APIs. Docs here.
Messages routed to you from a user are called MO messages (Mobile Originated) and most 3rd party SMS gateways implement simple api's whereby they will simply HTTP post you incoming messages (including the originators msisdn and home network).
For example http://www.clickatell.com/products/two_way.php
Search the site for SMS Gateways for others.
Check SMS Studio - guys have done a lot on that subject and maybe you can use of-the-shelve software or customize it a little to suit your needs.
If not, at least you can find some good keywords for googling.
Anyway, you will have a choice - either go with SMS gateway, or for low volume SMS traffic, you can go with GSM Modem and handle it manually, though it's not recommended.
I've been trying to build a web based chat application for the past three weeks and i'm facing issues with whatever route (programming technique/technology) i take to build it. I've explained the issues i've experienced with all of'em below. Kindly provide whatever insights you have in this.
ASP.NET-AJAX
First issue is that it is Not Really Real Time
If client hits the chat server every x seconds (constant time stamp) it is not going to be real time unless x is very very less
If x is very small like 1 second and if there are 1000 users online at the same time i think it is really going to hammer the chat server and cause scalability/performance issues
WCF-Duplex
I unfortunately wasted considerable amount of time in this trying to build a WCF duplex service which maintains all the clients and invokes the client through the channel as and when required. But i recently learnt that WCF duplex callback wont work with ASP.NET (since http is request and respond type). I was following this great article to build a duplex service.
Comet/ReverseAjax/HTTP Server Push
I'm extremely new to this technique and wonder how well enough it can scale. After my first glance on this programming technique here in wiki and the very first article on Comet by Alex here, i learned that the client always maintains an open connection (long living ajax calls) to the server which can be used by the server to push "interesting events happening in the server" to the browser (client). So how well can it scale? What if the max no of open connections exceed in IIS or any other issues like that?
Jabber Server/Client (XMPP)
I see that most of the prominent chat applications that can be seen online are making use of Jabber. I also learned that writing a Jabber server from the scratch is a tedious task. I have separate user profile store for by application. Can i integrate that with Jabber easily? Any open source Jabber servers that i can host privately? (I've seen many open source tools to build the client easily)
Any insights provided are very much appreciated.
Thank you
NLV
If you are using .NET, check out WebSync. It allows for fully scalable comet using IIS to integrate directly with your application. There is a free Community edition you can try out, along with tons of examples and chat demos.
I just recently implemented a multi-client Jabber web-app using WebSync and jabber-net.
PokeIn provides shared objects among the clients and it simply helps you to create impressively solid and fast web applications. Even if your application is hosted on multiple servers, PokeIn manages the shared objects on all of them. So, this feature will help you to create quite effective solutions. In addition to these, you will find very useful samples over there
I know this is old but if somone new founds this you should consider using SignalR
Open Source Jabber Server
Have you checked out OpenFire