I used to write bots for Yahoo's (and a few others) chat rooms back in the mid 90s. Nothing malicious, I was just a bored teenager so we're talking pretty dumb stuff like spamming naughty words in public chat rooms, etc. Anyhow, my point was this: the bots I wrote did just what you described, I used Win32 APIs to control the chat clients. As you said, it took only a few seconds to bang out the code and the bot could work on against multiple different chat clients with very little additional work.
The only time I've every bothered to write my own chat protocol client was for IRC in the late 90s (at which point I'd left college, was working full time so had turned my programming skills to good) and the only reason I bothered to write my own IRC client was because I was utterly fed up with the quality of Windows clients.
Back in the old days, Win32 APIs were so insecure that you could have all sorts of fun with them. I'm not sure how things stand these days though; my development these days are almost exclusively Linux and UNIX based.
The only time I've every bothered to write my own chat protocol client was for IRC in the late 90s (at which point I'd left college, was working full time so had turned my programming skills to good) and the only reason I bothered to write my own IRC client was because I was utterly fed up with the quality of Windows clients.
Back in the old days, Win32 APIs were so insecure that you could have all sorts of fun with them. I'm not sure how things stand these days though; my development these days are almost exclusively Linux and UNIX based.