We have a modem terminal application written in VB6. It works great for what we need it to do, but there is a new requirement to initiate a VPN connection when dialing a particular provider. I've looked over some related posts and it looks like this may be possible using the RAS API. Can anyone suggest resources/advice for working with this API beyond MSDN?
Difficulty - .NET is not an option.
Is .Net completely not an option or is it not an option to switch everything you have into .Net? You could create a .Net class library and enable COM+ and then use the library in your existing VB6 application.
Apologies if this isn't an option either.
In worse case where you only find .NET examples I would use .NET Reflector to see what APIs the .NET framework is calling and what parameters it is passing. I did this when I was trying to use GDI+ in VB6. A algorithm worked great in .NET but failed badly when I used the direct API in VB6. Using reflector I found the parameter I was messing up and then it started to work.
This may not be as robust as you need, but I have called out to the system rasdial command in the past for simple situations where I needed to setup a VPN connection.
USAGE:
rasdial entryname [username [password|*]] [/DOMAIN:domain]
[/PHONE:phonenumber] [/CALLBACK:callbacknumber]
[/PHONEBOOK:phonebookfile] [/PREFIXSUFFIX]
rasdial [entryname] /DISCONNECT
rasdial
Not industrial strength, but good to use in scripts and such.