I had been thinking of writing a program which will allow be to dial a number using Vonage especially being the fat-butter-fingered-lazy-ass that I am. . Although I wanted to do this for a while, I could only get around to writing it over the holidays. The program is fairly simple to use as shown below.
- Enter your User Name and Password
- Click on Connect
- This will connect to Vonage and authenticate your user name and password.
- If successful I retrieve a list of the Phone Numbers associated with your account. These could be more than one lines or soft phones you have.
- Select the Vonage line you want to use.
- Enter the Phone Number you want to dial.
- Click on Dial.
- Your Vonage phone should start ringing, when you pick up that line it will automatically start dialing the phone number you entered in Step 4 – how cool is that.
There are two ways you can install this, but before you do that you need to have the .NET 2.0 runtime installed on your machine. If you don’t have this you can download the v32 bit or the v64 bit.
To install Vonage Dialer you can either:
- Use Click Once and install the application over the internet – this is easier for most users but you will need to use Internet Explorer.
- Once installed successfully you will find the application under Start => All Programs => Vonage Dialer
- Alternatively, you can download the setup file (395 kb) and unzip it and double click on setup.exe and install the application.
- Once installed successfully you will find the application under Start => All Programs => Amit Bahree => Vonage Dialer
Note: The installation is different between the two installation methods!
If you don’t want to enter the user name, password every time then you can enter these values in the VonageDialer.exe.config file which will be in the location where you installed the program.
A couple of variations that I would like to work on are:
- Write a Outlook add-in which will allow you to right click on a contact and dial it from there.
- Write a Sidebar gadget for Vista – allowing you to dial any number from your desktop.
Let me know how it works out and if you would like any enhancements. As always usual disclaimers apply (read – if this breaks something on your program, don’t come crying to me). .