This will sound funny, but I will allow myself to continue. I decided to create this program after seeing 'The Matrix' movie. I stood up and said 'I will be a hacker' or something like that. But it wasn't only that. Each summer I set up a small network at my home ( just connect two PCs ). Each PC is placed in a different floor. So I got the idea that it would be fun to have a program which would allow me to send a message to the other pc without an internet connection. As a result, this program was born.

It is hard to define what this program really is. This program allows the user to establish a connection with a certain remote server through a certain port. Not enough, Sentinel is also a chat. Two users can use this program for chatting. Both can connect to each other and chat easily if at least one of them knows his/her PC's IP. For the chat to be established, either a LAN or Internet connection is required. In addition, this program also has a simple portscanner. The user sets the address of a certain server and the scanner tries to connect through all of the possible ports. Once it succeeds to connect, an open port is listed.

This program features a hacker's like GUI. It was quite a lot of work at that time seeing as I wasn't using any special development environment which would allow to easily design such a GUI. I had to gain such a look only by using pure Win32.

This project gave me a good understanding of how to customize the look of Win32 controls, how to program Windows Sockets 2 and it was the first time I launched more than a single thread.

LAN or Internet connection.

• Executable ( 64 KB )
• Source code ( 154 KB )