Terminal Control Project (C# VT100 SSH Telnet)

• Download demo project w/ source - 275 Kb

Introduction

This article demonstrates how to implement SSH and Telnet through a VT100 Emulator designed using Microsoft GDI+ and Microsoft C#.

Background

I'm *not* a professional programmer. I enjoy programming as a hobby. My trade is in Network Engineering. I use various tools, some I've written, some commercial. This project started when I wanted to integrate some SSH capabilities into a tool I had written. After struggling with SSH, I decided it was probably beyond my capacity to understand enough to write my own SSH library. I couldn't justify spending money on some of the commercially available SSH components, and I eventually found the Granados SSH library.

After implementing Granados SSH library into my application, I realized the need to interpret and emulate VT100. That... is immensely more difficult than you think. I discovered a project at SourceForge, called "Ackterm". The person who created the Ackterm project had mostly implemented VT100 with Telnet.

I combined Granados with Ackterm to a *.dll control that I could drag onto a Windows Form in Visual C# (or C++ or Visual Basic). It needs a *lot* of work still, such as finishing up the scrolling, text selection, implementing a clipboard copy, etc. Some control codes still aren't programmed in. But, it's basically functional enough that a moderately skilled C# programmer should be able to finish where I left off. Recently, I discovered that my company already has a license for one of the commercial Terminal Emulators, so I stopped work on this project. I would be thrilled if anyone finished it up, as I have no plans to do so. Maybe in the future I may have time, but it's not likely.

Using the code

When you download the project, you'll find two directories, "TerminalControl" and "TerminalControlTest". The Visual Studio Solution file is in the "TerminalControl" directory.

The "TerminalControl" project produces the DLL file. The "TerminalControlTest" is just a Windows form to use while developing the DLL.

You will need the .NET Framework v1.1, and Visual C# 2003. I guess you could use the free compiler, but I've not tried it. The source code will probably be really hard to navigate without Microsoft's IDE and intellisense.

Points of Interest

• AckTerm
• Granados

History

• March 14^th, uploaded the project.