Hi,

I had an idea for an MSN (Windows Live Messenger) "addin" today, which I thought was a great project for me to try.

Basically, I want people to be able to type LaTeX code in their MSN conversations, and my application parses the LaTeX code and displays (probably in a separate window, but if possible inside the conversion window) the math formula.

I am probably not going to get it to send the image in the conversion window, but I will be happy if I can get it to display in a separate window.

Basically, all I need for this to work is to capture the text that a user receives over MSN. If it contains a certain token (like "$$ ... $$") then I can try to parse the text between the dollar signs, and if it is valid LaTeX I can show an image of the result in a separate window.

So, I probably don't even need an actual MSN plugin / addin, if I can just get the received text by some other means.


1. Can anyone guide me to some basic Windows Live Messenger add-in programming examples / tutorials? I've never done this before, and have no clue how to do it... VB/C# are both fine.

2. Does anyone know how to retrieve the text that you receive using either an addin, or some sort of windows API ?


So I'm looking for either an addin, or, if possible, a completely separate application that basically monitors each and every window and sees if it's from MSN, and then retrieves the received text...

Thanks for any help!