I'm trying to automate a hidden .NET application, with another .NET application (written in c#) using the easiest way possible. It's NOT for testing purposes, it's a way to fulfill the lack of scripting for this application.
I already tried white framework, but there is one major problems with it: the way it's working. It's slow and it's not working on hidden windows and controls (like the winAPI does). Whats more, when "clicking" white moves the mouse, brings it's targeted window to the front and so on.
I was also thinking about using a user32.dll wrapper, because the way it's handling it's target is what I need, but I've red it's not working with .NET applications. It also would be a problem working with it, because my targeted application got 5 button labeled "...", and would be really hard finding 2 of them I need. I also would like to use the controls .NET id (the name the developer gave to it's controls when designing the GUI).
BTW, my targeted application is MeGUI if that helps. We do a lot of video encoding and a tool like this would help us a lot. I need the MeGUI to be hidden, because I'm the only programmer, others using my tool shouldn't see what happens in the background, not to talk about the many windows popping all around.
You can add a reference to the exe from your project and then create an AppDomain to run its main method. From there, it should be possible to queue delegates to its main thread's loop. With a bit of reflection, you could have those delegates invoke the click events and whatnot directly.
I've never attempted this approach, but it should work.
You should try Stephens idea instead of scripting a hidden app. A .NET Windows Forms App (EXE) is still a .NET Assembly and that means you can use that the same way as a DLL, just add a reference and use the public classes.
If you still want to try some scripting, take a look on the "Microsoft UI Automation" API and the "System.Windows.Automation" namespace.
Nice article here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163465.aspx
MSDN Doc: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.automation.aspx
Related
I want to write a desktop gadget that will group icons on my desktop (using c# & WPF).
It will be a docked window that I can drag icons to it and they will stay their. Also there can be couple of this windows.
Where do I begin?
**I saw all the post here about it but I got lost. Please direct me to examples and explanation pages.
To expand on cevik's answer:
You cannot create WPF applications as gadgets BUT you have two options (which aren't as bad as you'd expect).
The reason is that widgets are composed mainly of web pages (HTML) and not executable (*.exe).
The problem of course is that WPF will only work with & produce executables.
First option - Windows API:
When I said you can't what I really meant is you can't use the Windows Vista/7 gadget platform to make your widgets.
However, you can always achieve a similar effect by using the Windows API.
The Windows API will let you do stuff to windows such as making them always on the background of other programs, which sounds to me like ~80% there (The rest would be stuff like making sure your window doesn't get re-sized or minimized, etc.).
Just as a note, the function you'd be looking for to make the window behind all other windows would be SetWindowPos (specifically the second parameter).
However make sure there isn't a library which already implements these stuff because it can be rather difficult (and consist of A LOT of surprises).
Second option - Silverlight
silverlight can be perceived as WPF for the web.
That obviously solves our problem.
However there is a cost to it, as expected.
Silverlight doesn't have all the features WPF has (possibly not all of the .NET framework as-well, not sure about that as I'm not really using it).
However it should be more than enough to get you by so you should definitely check it out.
Once you have your Silverlight application (and webpage) you'll have to create a manifest & install the gadget to your desktop. See here how to do so.
Maybe this will help you.
Template to easily get started on developing a Sideber Gadget using Silverlight 3.0 or 4.0 controls in C#.
I think it's possible to somehow hook with the windows environment (specifically explorer.exe) and trigger specific things, for example launching control panel and using it as if I had mouse (meaning I'm clicking the interface from the code).
Basically what I'm trying to do is automate some redundant tasks I do often, just I don't know how it's done, or even how it's called. Anyone can point me in right direction?
Thanks!
Forget about "automated clicking". GUI tools are just front-ends to control the system. You can control the system like they do, it will be much easier.
Huge possibilities can give you Microsoft Management Console. Each "snap-in" can be accessed via COM model. Some of them have GUI front-ends, find and fire "*.msc" files (somewhere in Windows directory) to try them.
There is many command line tools i.e. "net" command has huge abilities related to networking.
PowerShell may be a better choice instead of C# or C++, it's designed for task automation. You can easily use COM, .NET, MMC ...
Windows Explorer has a COM object model that you can call from both C# and C++. (Most of the examples on MSDN are in Javascript or VBScript, which I guess aren't your languages of choice, but they demonstrate that the API is straightforward to call.)
AutoHotKey is a scripting environment specifically designed for this sort of task
If you want mostly to launch control panel you can do using RunDll32 interface existing in the most control panel applets. See http://www.osattack.com/windows-7/huge-list-of-windows-7-shell-commands/ , http://support.microsoft.com/kb/167012 or http://www.winvistaclub.com/t57.html for example. For the corresponding API see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/164787.
Another option is usage of control.exe (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144191.aspx and http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/control.htm).
If you google more you will find much more examples which you can to automate a lot of things without using of some general ways to automate GUI.
At more or less the lowest level within Win32, you can use the SendMessage() API to send raw click messages to windows of interest. This will rely on a lot of intrusive knowledge about the apps you intend to drive. However, you could easily implement a "click recorder" that could replay click sequences captured from user interaction.
I've inherited a C# window's application that I'm not real crazy about. I've got a looming deadline and I'm scared to death that some of my changes might be having adverse effects on existing functionality.
I've got a hobbyist background to RoR and I'm fairly comfortable with testing in that framework (using both RSpec and Cucumber).
I love having test scripts that can be ran on a regular basis and I'm willing to spend my personal time developing those for this particular project. I purchased a book from PragProg.com on scripted GUI testing with Ruby (http://pragprog.com/titles/idgtr/scripted-gui-testing-with-ruby). So far, I'm digging what I'm seeing and I think that this should work well.
Unfortunately, I've got a fundamental lack of understanding concerning Windows app development. I'm making calles to FindWindowEx (via Win32API) to "attempt" to retrieve sub-controls in my application.
A big part of my confusion is how I should retrieve the Class Name of the control that I'm trying to capture. The example provided in the text is as follows:
edit = find_window_ex.call #main_window, 0, 'ATL:00434310', nil
Where #main_window is my application's main window handle, and 'ATL:...' is the class of a text box area. There is no explanation given as to how the author arrived at 'ATL:...'.
I've read some very old posts concerning MS's SPY++, but those seem to be obsolete (or for some reason it wasn't installed when I installed vs2010).
So, what's the best way for me to find control classes to be used with the findWindowEx call? I do have the source code - should I be pulling from there? What if I don't have the source code and I want to automate an application? Is there a utility that allows you to somehow "browse" controls on a running application?
Sorry for the length - thanks in advance for the help!
Bob
The best is for you to install the components so that you get Spy++, this is the best way I know of to get to the actual class names esp. if you do not have the source to the original controls, which might be from a library or possibly some standard ActiveX controls that Microsoft ships.
The ATL class name is probably for controls developed using Microsoft Active Template Library (ATL), this is a C++ template library which significantly simplifies the development of ActiveX controls, and COM objects etc. in C++.
I have a WPF app which contains a number of child controls.
One of these controls hosts a third party library which underneath the covers runs some native code which throws access violations and crashes the application. Unfortunately removing the library is not an option.
What I'd like to do is spin up a new windows process, host the third party library inside that, and somehow communicate with it. Much in the same way that Google Chrome and IE8 handle browser plugins.
The issue is that the third party library needs to draw to the screen, so I have to somehow have the equivalent of an HTML iframe inside my WPF app's main window.
I'm not sure how to get started on this, it's proving difficult to google for thus far. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
This is a tough one, but fortunately for you there is a little work being done in this space lately.
Have you heard of the System.Addin namespace in .NET 3.5? It could probably help in this case. It allows for controls to be loaded in a separate AppDomain, but be displayed in the same UI. I'd imagine you'd have to do a little bit of work to get everything communicating properly (never done this before), but it's possible.
Have a look at this early post from the Add-in team: http://blogs.msdn.com/clraddins/archive/2007/08/06/appdomain-isolated-wpf-add-ins-jesse-kaplan.aspx
Seems like they keep their samples and helper code on codeplex: http://clraddins.codeplex.com/
I'm very interested in this, so if you get this working, let us know how this went for you!
Coming in way late. If you still need this, have you seen this project: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/changov/hosting-wpf-ui-cross-thread-and-cross-process
I'm running multiple plugins in multiple external processes in my LOB app. My framework grew out of the project above.
Probably not the easiest of tasks. Have you considered hosting your 3rd party stuff in a separate App-Domain? That way you will also get a good level of isolation while saving you the hassle of another project. Does it have to be refreshed constantly or could you refresh at predefined points in your application? Maybe some scheme where you basically do a screenshot of the 3rd party output and show it as image in your original app would then be possible...
I'm creating my first WPF application and I wanted to understand if there is some kind of best practice when mixing functionality from the System.Windows.Forms namespace.
Basically I want to have a popup window that opens by default in the bottom right hand corner of the users monitor.
I can't find a Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds equivalent in the WPF namespaces. The examples I have seen suggest referencing System.Windows.Forms in the WPF Application.
Which led me to the question, is this bad practice?, considering this reference isn't included by default.
I'm going to reference the WPF required resource in my existing windows forms application so that I can use this new WPF Window.
Is there anything wrong with this approach?
EDIT: I have actually found a property that returns information of the primary screen without referencing Windows Forms. The property is SystemParameters.WorkArea, my question of mixing references does still stand though.
Also you should consider resources and performance overheads as your application will have to load assemblies for both Windows Forms and WPF. It was mentioned several times within MSDN forums that WPF/Winforms interopping takes quite a lot of CPU cycles...
I don't think that referencing WinForms, when needed, is bad. Since WPF is still a relatively new technology, it just doesn't have complete feature parity with WinForms yet. For example, to my knowledge none of the standard Windows dialogs (Open File, Save File, Browse for Folder, etc.) have been implemented in WPF yet. The only way to display these in a WPF application is to use the WinForms version, or use P/Invoke to display the Win32 versions yourself. I go with the WinForms version personally, since they already took the trouble of wrapping the Win32 API.
My approach is to use WPF as much as possible, and only fallback to WinForms if WPF doesn't fill my needs. Hopefully over the next release or so of WPF this will become less and less necessary.