A.4 Embedding PuTTY in other programs
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A.4.1 Is the SSH or Telnet code available as a DLL?
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A.4.2 Is the SSH or Telnet code available as a Visual Basic component?
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A.4.3 How can I use PuTTY to make an SSH connection from within another program?
A.4.1 Is the SSH or Telnet code available as a DLL?
No, it isn't. It would take a reasonable amount of rewriting for this to be possible, and since the PuTTY project itself doesn't believe in DLLs (they make installation more error-prone) none of us has taken the time to do it.
Most of the code cleanup work would be a good thing to happen in general, so if anyone feels like helping, we wouldn't say no.
See also
the wishlist entry
.
A.4.2 Is the SSH or Telnet code available as a Visual Basic component?
No, it isn't. None of the PuTTY team uses Visual Basic, and none of us has any particular need to make SSH connections from a Visual Basic application. In addition, all the preliminary work to turn it into a DLL would be necessary first; and furthermore, we don't even know how to write VB components.
If someone offers to do some of this work for us, we might consider it, but unless that happens I can't see VB integration being anywhere other than the very bottom of our priority list.
A.4.3 How can I use PuTTY to make an SSH connection from within another program?
Probably your best bet is to use Plink, the command-line connection tool. If you can start Plink as a second Windows process, and arrange for your primary process to be able to send data to the Plink process, and receive data from it, through pipes, then you should be able to make SSH connections from your program.
This is what CVS for Windows does, for example.
A.5 Details of PuTTY's operation
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A.5.1 What terminal type does PuTTY use?
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A.5.2 Where does PuTTY store its data?
A.5.1 What terminal type does PuTTY use?
For most purposes, PuTTY can be considered to be an xterm terminal.
PuTTY also supports some terminal control sequences not supported by the real xterm: notably the Linux console sequences that reconfigure the colour palette, and the title bar control sequences used by DECterm (which are different from the xterm ones; PuTTY supports both).
By default, PuTTY announces its terminal type to the server as xterm. If you have a problem with this, you can reconfigure it to say something else; vt220 might help if you have trouble.
A.5.2 Where does PuTTY store its data?
On Windows, PuTTY stores most of its data (saved sessions, SSH host keys) in the Registry. The precise location is
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY
and within that area, saved sessions are stored under Sessions while host keys are stored under SshHostKeys.