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Desktop Application Crawler

Good Morning,
I am looking at the feasibility of generating a Desktop Application Crawler. This application crawler would work in a similar way to a web crawler - it would interrogate the application to obtain a UI structure. To fit with other ongoing projects this would be coded in C#.
The program would be able to get Window and Control properties and generate a list of which controls are present on which Windows.
Is such a thing possible? - I assume it is as projects like Microsoft's UI Spy do a similar job. The output would be a simple XML format.
Thanks in Advance,
JH

Also it not very clear what you exactly mean, but for investigating the content of specified WinsowsApp written in .NET you can use ManagedSpy.
Is you want ot have some mertics information delivered to you in a way of service you can relay one Desk Metrics (they have a free of charge plan too)
If it's not what you're asking for, please clarify.

Desktop Application - Update Text to website

We have a 5 page website and we are looking to make a desktop application to update parts of the text just 1 or 2 words to start off with , simple change the html word of hello to test from the desktop program.
I know parts of visual basic 2008 but im not a master of it and so i didn't know if that was the best way to go forward or any other programming languages.
Also what would be the best code way to try and update the text on the website
Any websites would be appreciated so i could learn and possibly build on this as this would be something id like to get into
thanks

That's a bit much to answer fully here. I can give you the basic steps and links to resources to help you on your way.
Without going into specifics, you want to do the following:
Create your website using ASP.NET (since you tagged this as .NET)
Save the text that you want to be changeable in a database
Use DataBinding in ASP.NET to retrieve the data from the database to show it on the pages.
there are plenty of videos on how to do this at http://www.asp.net
You'll have to choose between Web Forms and MVC. if you're brand new I won't try to confuse you. WebForms is a bit easier to use if you've never done real web programming before, but MVC is becoming much more popular. Since it sounds like you're new I'm going to recommend you start at http://www.asp.net/web-forms and pay attention to the "Learning Resources" area
Create a Windows Forms application to update the data
there are plenty of videos on how to do this at http://www.windowsclient.net
Technically you could update the data from an ASP.NET application, or even a Visual Studio Lightswitch app, but you specified you wanted to make a Desktop app, which I interperet as being a standard Windows app.
Of course, you'll have to host this website in IIS. I'm assuming you're already doing that...

Beginner C# applications [closed]

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I just started learning C#, and I want to start making some small applications that are easy, but powerful.
Does anyone have any projects ideas? I'm interested to hear what you have in mind. Most of my experience is with HTML, CSS, JS, PHP.
Thanks

What do you like doing? I find games are always a cool place to start. If you like game-development you can do stuff like pong and pacman, but you can still have a lot of fun just making board and card games without much of the graphics complexity.
Here's some to get you started:
easier: tic-tac-toe, connect-4, go fish, black-jack, candyland, various solitaire games
medium: monopoly, poker, go, checkers, Yahtzee,
harder: scrabble, boggle, chess, Magic: The Gathering
here's different levels of difficulty:
design the logic. For example, make classes and methods to represent the board, properties, and the players in monopoly.
start making a gui. Make the game actually playable!
add AI and computer controlled players. Obviously AI is a huge subject, so there's many different ways you can go.
see here for a ton more projects on various topics

Since C# can be used in multiple types of applications, I'd try to do the same task in each. Perhaps a simple app that connects to a database and performs a lookup based on user input. Maybe connect to the "pubs" database that comes with the SQL Server samples.
You could do this as:
Winforms
ASP.NET WebForms
ASP.NET MVC
Dynamic Data
WPF
A Console app
using
Standard ADO.NET
LINQ
Entity Framework
You can even create a Windows Service that uses WCF, and a WinForms or ASP.NET front-end that consumes that service.
The idea is to get as many TYPES of apps under your belt as possible, so you can see how each is similar, and how each is the same. It will also help you get a better understanding of the "religious wars" over "which is best, Web Forms vs. MVC", etc. The ultimate answers to those "holy war" questions is invariably "what you're most comfortable with". There's nothing like having actual experience with the various options than to actually write something, so a nice, simple app in all of the available flavors would be a very good start.
And finally, since I listed so many things, here are some great starting points for everything I mentioned. There are videos, walk-throughs, etc to help you on your way.
http://www.asp.net/
http://windowsclient.net/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx

How about a scientific calculator? It'll give you basic experience with GUI building and event handling, it shouldn't be too hard to knock one up and most of your focus will be on the language rather than complicated algorithms (which is what you want when you're just starting to pick up a language.)

I've always heard that a simple game like checkers is good place to start. It lets you handle things like:
Separation of Model from UI (possibly
with a view model).
Skinning of controls or custom controls
and is easy to understand and test.

You can try to create something likes todo list. You can to provide a lot of custom feature for it (save/open data files, import to other formats, UI)

A good place to start is something like a calendar/todo application.
You won't beat all the great programs already out there that solve this problem, but you can start with a very simple but functional program, and add a feature a day for the rest of your life without running out of things you can do.
This gives a lot of opportunities for using different UI elements, doing some custom graphics rendering, serialisation/streams/io, database access, and even synchronising with web-based calendars, etc. i.e. It's easy to find a use for many different .net technologies within an application like this, but you don't need to use them: you can write a basic "useful" application in only a few minutes and keep adding to its facilities to learn new technologies.

Personally, something I'd like right now is a program that performs batch file management operations...
Sorting files into subfolders based on date or name patterns;
Renaming files based on user-defined patterns (e.g. add or remove a prefix from all filenames)
Renaming files based on metadata, if you can figure out how to read it (e.g. mp3 ID3 tags)
Then again, maybe this is too advanced. Or boring. I always find it fun to write a game that is a clone of an existing game, but add a twist. Like 3D tic-tac-toe... bad example maybe, but you get the idea.

Write a graphical dice roller simulator. It should be one window and when I press the "Roll Dice" button it simulates a roll of the dice, showing me an image of how my dice landed. And bonus points if it makes a nice dice roll sound. Extra bonus points if you let me choose how many dice to roll.
I expect to see this by tomorrow afternoon.
Good luck.

Maybe a little more advanced, but I enjoyed creating a little cheating program for playing the bejeweled blitz game. I followed Mike Vallotton's blog to get me started. it's here

Another good one would be to count the number of words in a text file.
Add a little more functionality to it by searching for keywords and returning how many of those were found in the text.

Start with writing a simple program using Form Application using a button and when clicked: Open a MessageBox saying Hello World. Then going over to new stuff like a webbrowser and then obtaining the source code from the site
3 basic steps in learning c# by webbrowser development:
1. create a basic browser that opens up a hardcoded site (site preprogrammed, not decided by user)
2. user controlled, textbox that the user can decide webpage with.
3.pulling out source code and changing every picture on a page for example. That will combine HTML and C# and since you have experience with HTML, changing the client side of the WebPage is good practice.
Good Luck :) Look up ThenewBoston on youtube, really great tutorials on C#

got a couple ideas:
you can make a pretty basic calculator [console application or windows form application]
you can make a dice (give random number between 1-6 or a random number between two numbers selected by the user.
a magic 8 ball, this uses the dice in the previous dot point, but instead uses the randomised integer and prints out the corresponding string.
you can make a planner application (an app that saves data such as todo list on a .txt file, etc).
you can also make a desktop assistant (i made one recently), that recognises voice and speaks to the user. It can also obey simple commands.
if you want to go deeper, you can try coding using C# to create unity games, i had some experience in this, it is very easy (got pretty good at it after reading some documentation and watching some tutorials).
but if you are just starting out, then i recommend you to work your way upwards and start off with making something simple.

What is a good project to learn Windows Forms programming in C#?

I want to learn c# so I can do some desktop developing. I've developed command-line C# applications and wanted to expand to Desktop applications.
I was thinking of create a screenshot tool like Jing or maybe a plugin for outlook to sync contact information with a service like Google.
What are your thoughts? My past experience is with web applications built in PHP.

I would try to start with something fairly contained, which only touched a few new technologies. For instance, if you want to learn Windows Forms, write something which uses that but doesn't need to talk to Outlook, Google, or the Win32 API. Once you've got the hang of Windows Forms, try one extra technology - try displaying your Google Contacts and do offline editing, for example. Then add another technology... etc.
In my experience it's hard enough to learn one new technology at a time - but that's far quicker than trying to learn two or more in one go. You inevitably get to the stage where you don't know where the problems are, and you have no confidence in any of your code because it's all new. This is particularly important if you're still fairly new to the language as well - although I'm glad to hear you started with some console apps :)
Sorry if that sounds like I'm being a wet blanket, and I realise it sounds like you'll take far longer to get to something useful that way, but I think you're more likely to be successful in the long run.

Find something that most importantly interests and excites you. If you pick something too boring that you don't care about you'll only give up before you get anywhere, and won't benefit at all. Don't do a rubbish project for the sake of learning a language. Do a good project, and do it in a new language as a side effect.

Make a notepad clone. While being fairly simple it will give you a primer in some basic Windows Forms mechanisms such as using menus and reacting on their events, getting input from controls for storage on disk, reading from disk and updating controls, using Docking and Anchoring and so on.

Twitter clients are the new hello world.
I read that somewhere the other day. I can't personally comment on its fitness for your goal.

Do something that you did before, but in another language. Then you won't have to think about most of the architecture of the particular task again, but you'll be able to compare the languages, the frameworks and their approaches.
I bet you'll learn a lot about your previous language as well doing this excercise.

A good project would be a simple windows form. You simply have a chance to put everything together. Or at least see a bigger picture.
You can make it as complicated as you want, without sticking to one area.

Suggesting a specific project is pointless. Think of something that interests you, or an application you want/need, then start making it - searching Stackoverflow/Google/MSDN/etc whenever you can't guess how to do a specific task.
For example, I had to make kiosk application that allowed customers to signup to a companies mailing-list. I tried using the Ruby framework Shoes, but it didn't work correctly on the laptop the application was to run on. Visual C# seemed like a better fit, and would almost certainly run correctly..
So I installed Visual C# Express, added a few labels and a button. I double clicked the button, and realised I didn't know the code to create a new WinForm window.. So I searched Google for "visual C# open new dialogue" or something, and I found out I had to add a new form, then call NewForm newwindow = new NewForm(); newwindow.show(); or similar.
Then, I added the username/email fields, then searched for "how to display an alert box" and checked I could display the form values.
That all worked, so now I had to decide how to store the emails. I had heard good things about LINQ to SQL, so looked into that, decided I wanted to use SQL Server CE (so I didn't have to install/run SQL Server on the laptop). That resulted in more searching around for how to make LINQ to SQL work with SQL Server CE..
Finally, I wanted to have a configuration panel to change the title/button strings etc (accessible via a certain keyboard shortcut).. A Google search revealed how to catch keystrokes, and I asked a Stackoverflow question about representing the settings (using a PanelView or something)
..anyway, the point of that slightly long, rambling and not terribly interesting story is.. You can learn many new technologies at once, as long as you have a specific application in mind (and you're determined to finish it!)
I learned C#, WinForms, SQL Server CE, LINQ to SQL, and simple application publishing stuff in a day - creating a functioning, useful application in the process - simply with a combination of prodding around, Google searches and Stackoverflow..

Data visualization in desktop applications

I would like to create data visualizations in desktop apps, using frameworks, languages and libraries that help with this kind of task. Visualizations should be interactive: clickable, draggable, customizable, animated...
What I would like to create is something similar to the examples seen here: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
These are the links I already know: http://delicious.com/laura_laura/visualization?setcount=100
The preferred language is C++/Visual C++ (MFC) because I'm familiar with it, but any other technology is welcome, I would like to make a list from "as similar as possible" to Visual C++ to "very different" from Visual C++.
WPF, flex, Adobe Air, flare, JavaScript (running in a browser as client-side apps with access to local files or as desktop apps) are possibilities, post any good links to examples, tutorials, how-tos, etc. that you know of.
What are the learning curves and complexity for the different options? Which one would you choose and why? Which one have you already worked with and how was your experience? How would you start with a project of this characteristics?

Your post has far too many questions in it to be answered easily in one response, so you might try re-posting with specific questions. Data visualization is a HUGE area of study and it's not significantly different for web applications versus desktop applications.
Put simply, it's the display of data in a way that visually tells the story of the data. It's most useful in cases where the volume of data is such that tabular display isn't effective. Trends, outliers, and abnormal occurrences can sometimes only be seen when data is represented visually. Visually can be a simple chart, or it can be more advanced visualizations such as treemaps or thematic mapping/GIS presentations.
If it's an area you're interested in studying, look into:
Edward Tufte - Author, professor, and all-around guru for the display of information
Many Eyes - from IBM AlphaWorks
Processing - A visual "sketching" language based on Java
Visualizing Data - An O'Reilly book by Ben Fry, one of the co-creators of Processing
Beyond that, I think specifics would depend on what you want to accomplish -- what data is being analyzed, who the audience is, and what the desired "message" is.

If you're willing to use the Flash/Flex/ActionScript/AIR development platform, then take a look at the "flare" library, from the prefuse project:
http://flare.prefuse.org/
I've only gotten my feet wet with it at this point, but so far I like what I see.