IRCX (Internet Relay Chat eXtensions) is an extension to the

Internet Relay Chat Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...

protocol, developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

. IRCX defines ways to use

Simple Authentication and Security Layer Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) is a framework for authentication and data security in Internet protocols. It decouples authentication mechanisms from application protocols, in theory allowing any authentication mechanism support ...

authentication to authenticate securely to the server, channel properties/

metadata Metadata is " data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

, multilingual support that can be queried using the enhanced "LISTX" command (to find a channel in your language), an additional user level (so there are three levels: owners, hosts, and voices), specific IRC operator levels, and full support for

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of e ...

(in nicknames, channel names, and so on). IRCX is fully backwards compatible with IRC; the new features are downgraded to something a standard IRC client can see (and UTF-8 nicknames are converted to hexadecimal). IRCX was originally supported on

Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. It runs exclusively on Windows Server operating systems. The first version was called Exchange Server 4.0, to position it as the successor to the relat ...

5.5 (in place of the old

Microsoft Chat Microsoft Comic Chat (later Microsoft Chat) is a graphical IRC client created by Microsoft, first released with Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996. Comic Chat was developed by Microsoft Researcher David Kurlander, with Microsoft Research's Virtual Wo ...

protocol, which is a binary protocol) and a module was available for Microsoft Exchange 2000. Microsoft started to put IRCX through a standardisation process with the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and ...

by publishing 4

Internet Draft An Internet Draft (I-D) is a document published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) containing preliminary technical specifications, results of networking-related research, or other technical information. Often, Internet Drafts are int ...

s of their protocol.

References

External links

IRCX Draft
The latest revision of the IRCX draft
TesX Server
Free, Open Source, Platform independent IRCX server Internet Relay Chat MSN protocols related to Internet Relay Chat {{IRC-stub

See also

References

External links