HOW to Embedding PuTTY in other programs?

A.4 Embedding PuTTY in other programs

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.