Skype Profile Image Downloader in Visual Basic

Submitted by GeePee on Friday, March 27, 2015 - 23:22.

Introduction: In this tutorial we are going to be making a simple program in Visual Basic to download someones Skype profile picture. How It Works: We are going to use the Skype API to act as a link to get the profile picture, from that we can use a simple download function within Visual Basic .NET to download the returned image through the link. Design: This program will take two components; Button, named 'skypeButton', text set as 'Download Profile Image' Textbox, named 'skypeText', where the user will enter the skype profile username. Verifying: Once the button has been clicked, we first want to check that the text falls within the Skype username requirements (greater than 5 characters but less than 33) and only contains letters/numbers. First we check the character length...

Private Sub skypeButton_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles skypeButton.Click
        Dim username As String = skypeText.Text
        Dim runDownload As Boolean = True
        If (username.Length >= 6 And username.Length <= 32) Then
                'Next code goes in here.
        Else : MsgBox("Username is not the right length!")
        End If
End Sub

Then we iterate through each character and ensure that it is allowed (contained within our allowed characters list), if any of them is not there, we set the boolean value of our earlier defined 'runDownload' variable to false...

Dim allowed As Char() = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789"
        username = username.ToLower() 'Easier to check against the allowed characters, case insensitive.
        For Each character As String In username
        Dim isFound As Boolean = False
        For Each c As Char In allowed
        If c = character Then isFound = True
        Next
        If Not (isFound) Then
                MsgBox(character)
                runDownload = False
        End If
Next

Then if the 'runDownload' variable is True/y/yes/ok/1 then no error occured, the username is ok, and we try to download the image...

If (runDownload) Then
        Dim link As String = "http://api.skype.com/users/" + username + "/profile/avatar"
        Dim fs As New SaveFileDialog
        fs.Filter = "JPEG Files | .jpg | PNG Files | *.png"
        fs.FilterIndex = 1
        fs.ShowDialog()
        If (My.Computer.FileSystem.FileExists(fs.FileName)) Then
                Dim result As MsgBoxResult = MsgBox("File already exists, overwrite it?", MsgBoxStyle.YesNo, "File Exists")
                If (result = MsgBoxResult.Yes) Then
                        Dim wc As New WebClient
                        wc.DownloadFile(link, fs.FileName)
                End If
        Else
                Dim wc As New WebClient
                wc.DownloadFile(link, fs.FileName)
        End If
Else : MsgBox("Not all the characters meet the Skype requirements for a username. Please try again with a different username")
End If

We let the user choose a save location, file name and file type out of .jpg or .png.

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