I have a C# application that was designed to run with a windows form but now needs to run as a scheduled task. I have had problems with this and I think it is because it needs to be "headless" in that it should have no concept of a user environment. The program has been written to run unattended in that it has an /AUTO arg which then will run from some defaults but the form is still shown which causes the problem.
I have looked around and I think there is a way to suppress the form in this situation but I can't find exactly how. Does anyone know how I can suppress the form and allow this application to run?
Take the logic required for the scheduled task out of your WinForms application and put it in a Console application. If you can reuse logic both places, move it into a shared library.
Convert your application to console mode and also check the "Hidden" checkbox in the 'General' tab of Task scheduler.
This will help you
Still if you want to use the WinForm application, then set its ShowOnTaskbar property to false.
And its very easy to convert your winform application to winform one. Just go to the project properties and change the output type to Console. But you need to do few tweaks in the code.
Check if the /AUTO parameter is set and then depending on whether or not is is. Change this in your Program.cs:
Application.Run(new Form1());
to
Application.Run();
this won't show a form and you can do whatever other things you like.
This is the best I can give you without having seen you code. Hop it helps!
You can tell the task to interact with desktop in which case a form that shows is not a problem. As long as your app will close by itself so the job finishes..
I made a form based thing and then wanted a scheduled task so wrote a commandline front end calling the form based app, and then pushed the 2 exes together with ilmerge so it cant get confused, because it was a cheap hack
If your code is properly written you can do an exe front end and use the same classes as your form (or dll) and work that way.
As far as I understood you, you do not need the Forms mode anymore, right?
If this is correct, I suggest implementing your application as service, e.g. a WCF service. It can permanently run and execute your business logic on a configured timer.
To make configuration of the timer easy and flexible, you could optionally imncorporate NCronTab. This allows you to schedule the task in a pattern as easy as 45 11 * * Friday (=> "Run every Friday at 11:45 am")
Related
I have a windows application that reads from a database and populates multiple Listview containers depending on what items the user selects. Some of the data in a particular Listview is right-clickable with a MenuItem option to ‘Write Data to Excel’. This may take around 10 minutes to complete.
I have the Excel Interop portion written in stand-alone code or can I incorporate it into the application project. The Excel Interop app takes only 1 parameter to do its thing.
My question is… should I incorporate it into the Windows App and use multithreading or run it as a standalone app (which seems more efficient), which is called from the Windows App? And what is a good way of doing that where the Windows app starts the process and then can forget about it.
I think that the answer for this one is answered by the question : "What should happen if the user closes the main application during those 10 minutes ?"
If the file should still be wrote, then a standalone application is perfect, cause your threads won't survive.
If the file creation should be interrupted, then I see no reason not to use multithreading, as it seems simpler by default, in particular debugging this part of the code is way easier if it's in the same application.
I would recommend for the below flow:
We can create our own queue which will be either maintained in database or file system.
Then we can write a scheduler which will fetch all the unprocessed request and with the respect to response mark appropriate status of queued item.
Now You application can just call the queuing process and move forward from there.
Use another thread to write it.
I'm not going to go into details why am trying to do this, instead of making the main application do the work. I think it's currently easier for me. But I'm not going to use this technique in the future.
In my case, the main form has a button that opens another form. In the second one for you can adjust the amount, pause, resume and stop the work of the console application (sound totally useless (and maybe stupid), but, like I said, I'm not going to go into details why). This means that the application must have access to all the variables and resources of the whole program and vise versa.
I know how to launch a new form trough a main form, but I don't know how to launch a console application.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention, that the console application is a part of the solution.
Your requirement is a bit vague; "the application must have access to all the variables and resources of the whole program and vise versa". 'Variables and resources' cannot be shared across processes, you will instead need interprocess communication of some form.
If your console app merely needs to communicate back to the calling forms app that a RPC has succeeded then use exit codes in the console app, see: How do I return a value from a console application to a service in .NET?
Otherwise this has been answered before: Getting the ouput from Console window into Winform application
You'll need to either create a console emulator (time consuming and difficult to get right), or fire up cmd.exe in another process and use remote procedure calls (or another inter process communication method) to communicate between the two processes
If you want to communicate between the two processes, take a look at this library here:
https://github.com/TheCodeKing/XDMessaging.Net
It allows you to send messages from one app to the other. For example, App1 sends a message "stop" on the channel "randomkey" to ConsoleApp1, ConsoleApp1 can listen on the channel "randomkey" and intercept the "stop" message and stop its current processing.
If you wanted to just open the console window, just use System.Diagnostics.Process.Start();
You can just call Main directly. Beware of doing this on the UI thread directly though!
SomeConsoleApp.Main(new string[]{"-O", "File 1.txt", "-some-parameter"});
Or if you only have an exe, you can do:
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("someconsoleapp.exe");
Basically, I have an application that runs every 15 minutes. I would like this Console application to remain hidden and not for example minimise/disturb full screen applications.
What would be the best way to accomplish this, it can't be a service though. I'm writing the console application in C#.
Thanks.
To run an application every 15 minutes use a scheduled task. The very simple way to avoid any window being shown is to make this a normal GUI app rather than a console app, but arrange that you do not show any windows in your GUI app.
like david said if you make it a gui program but never load any windows it will run in the background with nothing ever popping up or showing or anything.. another option would be to have your application run continuously and have it do something every 15 minutes...
One option would be to have the scheduled task run as a different user, Network Service maybe, depends on your needs. This will force it to run under the specificed users context and will not show up on other logged in users screens.
You don't need to do anything. A console application is invisible and doesn't interact with other windows. The only way to even know it's there is through Task Manager or something similar.
What is the best and cleanest way to close a console application on windows mobile?
The application by default is invisible and you cannot see it in the running programs, which is great for running a background process, but sometimes the user might need to close it..
Exit Main. Seriously. If you need someone to be able to exit is manually, there needs to be some mechanism like a shell icon and menu or a program in the Programs folder of something. How else would the user even know it's running? Any one of those visual cues would then set a named system event, and inside your Console app you'd have something listening for the same event (likely a worker). When it gets set, you take the actions required to shut down.
How would a user be able to close it if the application is not visible in the UI?
That's a great question. I once spent a long time trying to figure this out. Of course, we are assuming you can not (easily) return from Main. The correct answer on the desktop is System.Environment.Exit; But that method is conveniently not supported on CF.
An apparent second option is Application.Exit. That is on CF, but only applies to WinForms, and is in fact not guaranteed to exit your application.
So, throw an unhandled exception. ;)
EDIT: To kill it programatically from another app, you can look at Process.GetProcessById, and Process.Kill. Both of these are available on CF. You will have to somehow let the "killer" app figure out the "victim"'s ID. More convenient methods like Process.GetProcessesByName are not available on CF.
This technique isn't that elegant, though, and there may be permissions issues.
You could also consider some kind of IPC (inter-process communication), perhaps one overviewed in this previous Windows Mobile answer.
I decided to to read a boolean (keep alive) in the config file and have another application set it to false when I want to exit.
Its not that responsive but at least I can exit cleanly..
I wrote a console program in c# that takes up to three files as input, and does some data calculations on them.
I'd like to make a simple frontend that allows the user to easily
import files - basically choose up to three files to be routed to the backend code
change settings - I have about 10 settings that I'm currently storing in an app.config file. maybe a simple settings box would be nice
see what's going on - the console program shows some status messages that might be useful to display on a GUI
I have practically no experience with windows forms or GUI design, so I really don't know where to begin. I compiled the backend stuff into a *.dll and am currently playing around in design mode of sharpdevelop...but i really have no idea how to get the two to work together.
any pointers would be greatly appreciated!
The usual pattern, in cases like these, is to make the main features of the application into a class library and call that from a wrapping executable, such as a console app, winforms app or webforms app (if possible). That way you can easily adapt the interface as needed and simply route input and output to and from the class library.
Edit: I realize this isn't a very indepth answer, but I hope it helps to get started at least, together with any other answer that may arrive.
If you want to get started with GUI design in .NET, I recommend you choose WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). This is the latest technology released in the UI/graphics area by Microsoft and is where everything is heading now. (Windows Forms won't be obsolete for a long time, though it is surely but slowly becoming deprecated.) I noticed however that you are using SharpDevelop, which doesn't yet have real support for WPF (as far as I know), whereas it certainly does for WinForms. If there's any chance you can use Visual Studio, I recommend you begin by learning WPF. You have the advantage of not being confused by previous experience with the styles and methodologies of WinForms, so it would very much be the right way to go.
Whichever you wish to learn, the Getting Started page of WindowsClient.NET (the official MS site for both WinForms and WPF) would be a great resource. There's also a few MSDN articles on getting started with WPF.
Hope that helps.
Have you tried Visual Studio Express editions? They're free and come with a designer for either WinForms or WPF applications.
As a first pass you'll need 3 text areas for the filenames, with associated buttons to bring up the file open dialog (it doesn't actually open the file just returns the filename).
A label to display the status - updated from your worker code.
Then either the various radio buttons, check boxes etc for your configuration settings.
Oh and don't forget the "Start" button to set off your process.
If your process takes a while you ought to use a background worker thread. You can then implement a "Cancel" button to safely abort the process and tidy up if it goes wrong.
There will be optimisations and reorganisations that you can do once you've got it working.
Your question is quite indistinct. If you're asking about working with GUI, you should read some book on Windows Forms.
And if you're asking about how to put your dll in your new windows forms application, then you should just add a reference to it in winforms project's properties and then use classes from dll's namespace.