For learning purposes i'm developing a Class generation application in c# and winforms. I think It could be fine to include a command-line mode that allow to use the application in scripts.
It's a good practice to include a command-line mode in my applications? It would be better to have two different programs, one with GUI in one for the command-line?
Actually having a C# application be both console and GUI is problematic. Console applications (/t:exe) are launched and then the command prompt waits for them to finish. GUI applications (/t:winexe) the command shell launches them and then returns immediately. While you can create and run forms from a 'console' application, it will always have a background console displayed. On the other hand 'Forms' application don't have the stdin, stdout and stderr connected and, while they can behave as command line tools and process command arguments, they have problems when embedded in scripts (because the standard input/output is not hooked up).
If you want to expose the functionality from both GUI driven applications and scriptable/pipe-able batch processing too the best way is to compile your functionality into a class library, then built two separate applications (one GUI one console) that leverage that library.
I'm not a C# programmer, but when I program in C++, I find it most useful to:
1.) Create both a shared library with a C as well as C++ API for performing core app functionality.
2.) Create one or more commandline binaries accessible to the shell interpreter.
3.) Create a GUI application for typical end users, implemented with the library (not by invoking the binaries).
This separates the logic of the application from the interface to the application, and enables thirdparty developers to create alternative interfaces for the same application functionality. It also makes it easy to script, while at the same time catering to typical end users who want a nice, shiny GUI.
Yes. If you think the program will be useful in a scripted environment then include a command line mode (without UI) so it can be used in scripts.
It doesn't have to be a separate application, but it can be. Whether you want to do that or not is entirely up to you. I'd imagine that if you had two applications they'd share the same logic assemblies but the interface (one a GUI the other a command line) would just be different.
I agree with michaelsafyan about creating a library with core functionality.
What I would add is that you should check out powershell cmdlets as well.
Much command line activity will be migrating to powershell and it brings a lot to the table.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
I very often create such a utility as an API. If I need to use it from a simple command-line utility, that's easy - it just calls the API. If the command-line gets too complex, maybe it's time for a Winforms application - which can also call the API. If I wanted to use it from PowerShell, or from an MSBUILD task, those are still easy - they just call the API.
Creating an application on the windows platform that behaves correctly as a console application can be problematic it's an issue with the windows kernel architecture as they're considered two different types of application (they have a different subsystem that you generally specify in the compiler or linker options). You can still manually redirect the IO and open a console from a win32 application by the win32 function AllocConsole() and friends but this also has some issues. See This Old New Thing post for more information.
If you want your utility/prgram run in scripts you can expose it as COM.
Many script languages for windows had the hability to use COM objects directly.
You should include a command line interface in your application,
if it enhances usability and comfort.
For instance, calling a CLI command might be faster then starting the GUI, navigating through several menu layers to reach the same functionality.
You might ask the users of your application, if they would find it useful to have a CLI mode.
Some words on marrying CLI & GUI on Windows:
A windows application is either a GUI application or a Console application, but not both. This is an OS issue and there is probably nothing one can do about it.
The console subsystem in Windows is horrible and PowerShell didn't change that.
Your implementation options on Windows are:
the two files approach:
Provide two files: one .com with console, one .exe with GUI.
Because of the executable probing on the command line, the com file will get executed before the exe.
the console flickering approach:
Compile your GUI application with console mode on, then immediately after the start of the GUI you might call FreeConsole() to close it.
It's a bit annoying, but works. Bad: now you have a flickering console window. Pro: still one file.
I agree with #Remus Rusanu.
you should create a class library of your core functionality and then build GUI app(wrapper) for that.
and one other benefit of it is you might not even need to create a command line app as you can access your .net dll features using powershell..
you can find one example over here
Another great idea is to embed a scripting language. Then your program can be controlled by a script, and you get all the logic, branching, etc from the scripting language "for free."
There are many choices of what you can embed. Lua is one of the most popular and intended for just that purpose and is an excellent choice.
However, for a general purpose app, I'd take a hard look at embedding Python. Python is so popular, you'd have a larger group of people willing to take the effort to write a script for your app.
Related
I have a interactive perl shell script that asks the user for some input and accordingly with his choice the script returns another set of options to choose from.
Now, soon I will have a demand to create a web interface for it. No more black terminals with blinking prompt for our users.
I was wondering what is the best way to pull this off with minimum changes to the original script? How to keep the script running and wait for user input? What is the best way to send user input to the script and then return it?
Or should I refactor the script to use CGI? I want to hear some general direction that I should take. I already know just the basic of Perl and CGI.
If you are using CGI these days you might as well be using something modern and fast like Plack. Since Plack will wrap a CGI style application you can even use a CGI application "inside" Plack to get modern features, pluggable middleware, etc., alongside olde-fashioned 1990's traditions.
Depending on how complex your application is there's a number of small frameworks and helper modules that can make working with Plack easier. Converting a console application to use a web interface might be easier if you use something like Squatting or Kelp.
I'm adding Powershell support to an app as an internal automation/scripting language. One of the things I want to do is have a runtime environment where I can enter commands, get output, etc. So I started looking at implementing my own PSHost.
Then I imagined my future. Over time, I'll implement a prompt/command/execute/response+log loop, possibly a configurable UI, maybe some amount of debugging like simple breakpoints...
Oh no! I'll be writing my own ISE!
So my question is: is it possible to use the ISE for the Powershell scripting in my app? Perhaps through remoting? Perhaps through embedding of certain ISE components?
I haven't seen any way that ISE exposes its interface except as an end-user application. I have written a host, however, and it's not as bad as it sounds.
I've built a set of tools I use in my day-to-day work and I would like to make them look a bit more "professional" in order to sell them to financial institutions.
At the moment these tools are written in Perl and are executed from a DOS command line, it's extremely efficient but it doesn't look very attractive.
So, I would like to add a user interface to it but I don't really know what to use for language knowning that :
A Perl CGI interface hosted on the web is not an option since the information to be given as input is quite sensitive.
It would be ideal to sell it as a package/executable.
I don't really like the Perl/Tk interface.
I'm ok with rewritting the application in another language but I would prefere to reuse the main modules in Perl since it's very powerful with regular expressions and lists/arrays.
What would you advise me to do ?
Thanks,
Lory
If you want a non-web-based GUI, and don't like Tk, there's also Wx, which is a wrapper for the wxWidgets GUI toolkit.
However, web applications nowadays can be really easy to create (using a modern framework). Take a Mojolicious application, for example: Mojolicious carries no dependencies other than Perl 5.12.x, and provides its own web server (Hypnotoad). You can start by generating a "Lite::App", which is a simple self-contained single-file application, and then grow it to a bigger distribution later on as the need arises. It even comes with tools to convert your application to a conveniently packaged distribution that can be installed as easily as any CPAN module.
So that leaves the issue of security. User authentication, IP whitelisting, local network only... there are many ways to make a web application "for internal use only" if that's what you need.
You might just throw together a web-application prototype, and once you determine customer interest in your product, invest the substantial time in writing it as a Windows GUI application.
Continuing on from DavidO's answer, because the current web microframeworks for Perl (I prefer Dancer over his suggestion of Mojolicious, but both are good and largely equivalent) contain their own bundled web mini-servers, they also allow for the app to easily run entirely on the local machine.
Since these mini-servers default to a non-standard port (usually 3000 or 5000) by default and you can easily set them to a different port, they can be isolated by firewalls relatively easily, ensuring that nobody can connect to them remotely. You can also, of course, include and IP address check in the app and have it reject any requests that don't originate from localhost.
My guess is that the target system will be Windows. Use a RAD (Rapid Application Development) platform to develop a GUI. Examples for such a platform are Delphi or .NET with C# or VB. For bundling the Perl part, consider using a tool called perl2exe.
It doesn't sound like your scripts should require a web server. Also, consider the installation hassle. Only guessing as you're not giving much information about what your scripts are doing.
I am using the Cava packager to deploy my Perl-written tools. You can even generate an installer executable with just some mouse-clicks. It works pretty well with strawberry Perl and wxPerl on Windows.
I am presently maintaining an web application managing several server hardware. This application is written in Struts and UI is quite good. But middle part is full of bash scripts and perl scripts. I would like to redesign the same. But i am not sure which languages should be used. Presently my shell scripts are calling our properitory software exes , gather information , parse through shell, perl and store in db. can someone suggest better design. These shell scripts are called by model layer. Suggestion on better design is appreciated.
thanks,
nuslch
Our company is currently writing a GUI automation testing tool for compact framework applications. We have initially searched many tools but none of them was right for us.
By using the tool you can record test-cases and group them together to test-suites. For every test-suite there is generated an application, which launches the application-under-test and simulates user-input.
In general the tool works fine, but as we are using window handles for simulation user input, you can't do very many things. For example it is impossible for us to get the name of a control (we just get the caption).
Another problem using window handles is checking for a change. At the moment we simulate a click on a control and depending on the result we know if the application has gone to the next step.
Is there any other (simpler) way for doing such things (for example the message queue or anything else)?
Interesting problem! I've not done any low-level (think Win32) Windows programming in a while, but here's what I would do.
Use a named pipe and have your application listen to it. Using this named pipe as a communication medium, implement a real simple protocol whereby you can query the application for the name of a control given its HWND, or other things you find useful. Make sure the protocol is rich enough so that there is sufficient information exchanged between your application and the test framework. Make sure that the test framework does not yield too much "special behavior" from the app, because then you wouldn't really be testing the features, but rather your test framework.
There's probably way more elegant and cooler ways to implement this, but this is what I remember from the top of my head, using only simple Win32 API calls.
Another approach, which we have implemented for our product at work, is to record user events, such as mouse clicks and key events in an event script. This should be rich enough so that you can have the application play it back, artificially injecting those events into the message queue, and have it behave the same way it did when you first recorded the script. You basically simulate the user when you play back the script.
In addition to that, you can record any important state (user's document, preferences, GUI controls hierarchy, etc.), once when you record the script, and once when you play it back. This gives you two sets of data you can compare, to make sure for instance that everything stays the same. This solution gives you tests that not easy to modify (you have to re-record if your GUI changes), but that provide awesome regression testing.
(EDIT: This is also a terrific QA tool during beta testing, for instance: just have your users record their actions, and if there's a crash, you have a good chance of easily reproducing the problem by just playing back the script)
Good luck!
Carl
If the Automated GUI testing tool has knowledge about the framework the application is written in it could use that information to make better or more advanced scripts. TestComplete for example knows about Borland's VCL and WinForms. If you test applications build using Windows Presentation Foundation has advanced support for this build in.
use NUnitForms. I've used them with great success for single and multi threading apps and you don't have to worry about handles and stuff like that
Here are some posts about NUnitForms worth reading
NUnitForms and failed DragDrop registration - problem of MTA vs STA
Compiled application exe GUI testing with NUnitForms
I finally found a solution to communicate between the testing-application and the application-under-test: Managed Spy. It's basically a .NET application build on top of ManagedSpyLib.
ManagedSpyLib allows programmatic access to the Windows Forms controls of another process. For this it uses Window Hooks and memory-mapping files.
Thanks for all who helped me to get to this solution!
Managed Spy does not provide a solution for compact framework applications.
The company Jamo Solutions (www.jamosolutions.com) meets the requirements for automation testing on mobile devices, including .net compact framework applications.