log in to account serverside instead client side

Question

what i'm trying to do is load a webpage from serverside ,for example www.facebook.com then insert username and password programmatically and log in.using desktop application i know it's possible .i know how to do that in c#but in desktop/client side.but what i looking is do that in server side. for example i send a request with username and password to a site[my site].let's say www.fbloger.com. then server logging to Facebook using that details .so server can send me important details.my final requirement is to get an alert when a specific friend is online.so i don't need to always logged and check is she online.i can log in to fb as soon as server give me a alert.i don't know is it really possible

Answer 1

It sounds like you are trying to write some kind of server-side web crawler/spider. If this is the case, all you need to do is examine the network requests being performed in a browser then emulate these in C#.

In c# if you send the request with HttpClient, exactly as your browser does, you can then capture the returned web page and scrape the content with something like the HTML Agility Pack which allows you to query the HTML like an XML document for extracting the values you require. See http://html-agility-pack.net (get it via NuGet).

Answer 2

Since you know how to do that in C# simply use C# for server side code.

ASP.Net allows to use C# for code behind and you can copy (or better reuse) desktop code that signs in to a web site.

If your desktop code used WebBrowser control - you'll need to rewrite crawling code with something like HttpClient and avoid pages that execution of JavaScript to render/log in.