Development

If you're looking to create a client, we'd love to hear from you!

Clients
The only official clients for connecting to the MSN Chat Network are the MSN Chat Control (see MSNChat1) and the MSN Chat Admin Client.

There are various other unofficial ways of accessing the MSN Chat Network; The most common includes using the mIRC Internet Relay Chat client with it's extensive scripting abilities, as well as various custom programs which were often written using Microsoft's Visual Basic 6.0.

Authentication
With the exception of those clients created for MSN and IRC7, there are very few clients that can successfully connect to MSNDL, due to the strict authentication measures.

MSNLD allows only two types of valid IRCX authentication, as MSN Chat did
 * GateKeeper (and GateKeeperPassport)
 * NTLM

Both types of authentication were well known for MSN Chat, with NTLM being ussed by MSN Chat Staff, GateKeeper by users, and GateKeeperPassport by users with a .net Passport (now known simply as a Microsoft Account).

Resources

 * MSN_Chat_Information by eXonyte
 * Official_MSN_Chat_Clients