Introduction
This article describes a simple way to send text messages to a cellular phone from within a VB.NET desktop application. The source code provided includes a relatively good list of carriers to simplify the task of connecting with a cell phone, and the task itself is really no more difficult than sending an email message through a desktop or web based application.
Getting Started
In order to begin, unzip the downloaded files and open the project provided. Within the project, you will find one main class: frmMain.vb. The main form is a Windows application form, and it contains a few controls necessary to capture the fields needed to properly form the message. These fields include:
Recipient’s phone number: Captures the recipient’s cellular telephone number (10 digit).
Recipient’s carrier: Captures the recipient’s carrier.
Sender’s email address: Captures the sender’s email address.
Sender’s email server: Captures the name of the sender’s email server.
Message subject line: Captures the message’s title or subject.
Message body: Captures the sender’s message content.
The application is simple, but could easily be improved by validating each of the required fields through the use of regular expressions or by at least validating that the text associated with each of the text boxes is not an empty string. To maintain the simplicity of the project, little in the way of error handling has been included.
The following figure (Figure 1) shows a properly configured collection of input fields in use: