For a system I'm working on I need to call a list of Phone numbers programatically when something breaks. Basically a simple phone based alert system, and am guessing it could be done with Skype, but I'm wondering if anyone has experience doing this, Skype or not.
Anyways links and or tutorials would be great help.
Thanks
You might consider a system like Twilio instead. Try the demo account (1000 free minutes) - it's very powerful and easy to set up.
I would go with sms. You can have a clearer error's message than skype's phone generated with robotic voice :)
Just search google with "sms gateways", for the operator's list. Almost all of them give api and code examples for interfacing.
You could do it with any other VoIP system; hacking it together with SIP or XMPP networks should be fairly easy as they are standards with libraries avaialble for many platforms.
But Skype is a closed network, with a closed (and heavily protected) binary client. Even if you did manage to work out how to interoperate with it (and many have failed), they could just update the client code to keep you locked out. Skype is no fun at all.
About the best you could manage at the moment would be to use UI automation to simulate interaction with the real Skype client. (yuck.)