CPJNFinger v1.04 An MFC class to encapsulate the "Finger" protocol

Welcome to CPJNFinger, A very simple MFC class to encapsulate the Finger protocol. Finger for those not familiar with all the internet protocols is the protocol used to retrieve information about a systems users. The information returned is a simple string and can be used for any purposes. For example the USGS (United States Geological Survey) use Finger to allow up to date Earthquake data to be retrieved. 

For detailed information about the Finger, you should read RFC 1288. You can find numerous Web Servers which carry these documents by doing an internet search for "RFC" and "1288".

The sample app provided with the code implements a very simple GUI Finger client, a definite improvement over the console version provided by MS on NT.

Features

• Simple and clean C++ interface.
• The interface provided is synchronous which provides an easier programming model than using asynchronous sockets.
• The code does not rely on the MFC socket classes. These classes have a number of shortcomings, one of which causes problems when they are used in NT services.
• The code can be used in a console application without any problems (Again this is not the case for the MFC socket classes).
• A configurable timeout for the connection can be set through the main class method.

The enclosed zip file contains the CPJNFinger source code and a simple GUI based Finger client based on it.

Copyright

• You are allowed to include the source code in any product (commercial, shareware, freeware or otherwise) when your product is released in binary form.
• You are allowed to modify the source code in any way you want except you cannot modify the copyright details at the top of each module.
• If you want to distribute source code with your application, then you are only allowed to distribute versions released by the author. This is to maintain a single distribution point for the source code.

Updates

V1.0 (11 October 1999)

• First public release.

V1.01 (17 October 1999)

• The value returned from GetLastError is now preserved across calls to CPJNFingerSocket::Close.

V1.02 (3 November 2003)

• Updated copyright messages
• Simplified the code in CPJNFinger::ReadResponse. Thanks to Clarke Brunt for reporting this issue.

V1.03 (14 April 2006)

• Updated copyright details.
• Addition of a CPJNFINGER_EXT_CLASS macro which makes the class easier to use in an extension DLL.
• Renamed the class to CPJNFinger.
• Module has been renamed to PJNFinger
• Now uses the author's CWSocket sockets wrapper class. This now allows the code to support connecting via Socks4, Socks5 and HTTP proxies.
• Updated documentation to use the same style as my web site.
• Did a spell check of the documentation.
• Fixed a graceful disconnect problem in ReadResponse method.
• Fixed a issue in CPJNFinger::Finger when code is compiled with /Wp64

V1.04 (28 December 2006)

• Updated the code to compile cleanly on VC 2005
• Code now uses newer C++ style casts instead of C style casts.
• Provided a GetLastError method which returns the last error which the code encountered. This is required because due to C++ destructors, the value stored in GetLastError can be destroyed in the CPJNFinger methods.