I want to interact with a Photoshop file and create images using its actions and smart objects.
Is there any php or C# API to can do it?
First of all, I would like you to reflect on the legality of such a thing. Would Adobe let you practically just proxy their application to the web? I see they have a lot of licenses so maybe one of them actually grants you permission to do this (however, there could still be caveats so I suggest you read up on that). As that's not the question, I won't talk about this anymore, I just wanted to to mention it as it should be relevant.
Now, for the actual question - if you look at Microsoft Office Interop, Microsoft states that it is unsupported in a server-side environment. Go to this Microsoft page and read Problems using server-side Automation of Office in the More information section.
There are several issues if you decide to run a regular client application server-side, as stated on the mentioned page, but one of the most significant issues is the following:
Interactivity with the desktop:
Office applications assume that they are being run under an interactive desktop. In some circumstances, applications may need to be made visible for certain Automation functions to work correctly. If an unexpected error occurs, or if an unspecified parameter is needed to complete a function, Office is designed to prompt the user with a modal dialog box that asks the user what the user wants to do. A modal dialog box on a non-interactive desktop cannot be dismissed. Therefore, that thread stops responding (hangs) indefinitely. Although certain coding practices can help reduce the likelihood of this issue, these practices cannot prevent the issue entirely. This fact alone makes running Office Applications from a server-side environment risky and unsupported.
While this is written by Microsoft for their product, these are more or less applicable to any regular client application. And even if you still decided to go with this approach, as Neville K already suggested, it would be a very resource-hungry task.
Considering the above, I would maybe ask a different question, along the lines of "What library or server-side app to use for doing whatever you need to do with images".
Based on this link, you can do this things with Photoshop SDK:
"With the Photoshop SDK, you can enable your apps to drive and/or communicate with Photoshop CS6 (version 13.0.0 or later) via a TCP connection. It’s now possible to create an eBook of Photoshop tutorials that allows users to drive actions in Photoshop CS6 from within the eBook"
This sound like hard but some companies seems to make it work. Xee can read PSD too (and has an epic comment about this format in the source code).
But to quote someone over at HN:
PSD was never intended to be a data interchange format: it is the
serialization format of a single program that has more individual
unrelated features that actual people rely on than almost any other
piece of software and has maintained striking amounts of backwards
compatibility and almost unbroken forwards compatibility during its
over two decades of existence. This product's "file format" needs to
be critiqued in this context, along with similar mega-programs like
Office. I am thereby having a difficult time fathoming why anyone
would think that a PSD file is thereby going to be some well-organized
file format that they should easily be able to parse from their own
application is just naively wishful thinking: even other products
from Adobe have limitations while opening these files; to truly
manipulate these files you really need to be highly-compatible with
Photoshop's particular editing model (hence the conceptual
difference between these two classes of file format).
I would recommand to look at Xee for a server side utility.
Good luck.
You can use the scripting interface to kick off "Shell" tasks from any web language if you really want to.
However, I'd seriously worry about this approach - the memory requirements for Photoshop are such that you could only support a couple of users, and you'd need a fairly complex polling mechanism to check for the results of the "shell" task. Photoshop was simply not designed to power web sites in this way.
Consider using graphics libraries instead - I've used ImageMagick with great effect in the past.
Heed the warnings that you really can't process more than 1 or 2 images at a time with photoshop without crashing your server, so just putting it on your webserver is a non-starter. A lighter weight image library is much better for most tasks.
But you could queue up jobs from your web application and then process them on another computer, or limit it to just one at a time.
Adobe has macros and a full action/javascript based scripting environment that you could kick off from commandline or com.
Adobe Scripting Guide
http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/photoshop/pdfs/photoshop_cs5_scripting_guide.pdf
For older versions of photoshop you can use the macro functionality to Record an action. Then, create a droplet from the action. Call the droplet from the command line with an image file as the sole parameter. The path to the image file probably needs to be an absolute one.
Related
I've developed an application that helps users to play casino games "better", based on statistical calculations.
It's an external application that sniffs network, understands certain casino room protocols(some web based, some native application) and gives real time advices to user.
Recently I was contacted by different casino room operators that want to license the software from me, customize the graphics/strings/feature set and give it to their users under their brand name.
So I'm going to have N different installs for N different casinos, with different graphics for each, different strings, different feature set enabled etc.
What are best practices to handle such requirements in c# winforms application, should I have different resource files for each vendor ? Is there something built in .net framework to handle such scenarios? Are there 3rd party software that can help me to manage this ?
Please be as verbose as possible, and thanks in advance!
If this was an asp.net application I'd suggest using themes. They are not as well supported in form applications but there is good theme support in WPF. Check out http://wpfthemes.codeplex.com/
This should be straightforward because winforms is pretty "battleship grey" so once you've peeled off all decoration it'll be pretty plain and ready to start building up again.
Essentially:
Remove any and all references in the code/forms to product name/company/customer.
Start adding in specific "branding" items in the form of images and text etc.
Specifically:
Make sure the code has no reference to the product name/company/customer in namespaces etc.
Have all strings loaded from resource files (this'll help with localisation anyway).
If you want some "obvious branding" then have an image file loaded form disk or resources and displayed in a picturebox.
You can then have the same code built multiple times using a build tool, each time configuring the build with different resources.
Hey, I'm trying to create an installer for multiple games, from one server computer which individual computers then execute.
E.g. BF 1942, WC3, BF2, DOW. However i need to be able to select which applications to Install, which is a simple check box.
I only have a limited knowledge of c#. What is the best way of going about this?
I have looked at NSIS though i don't like the scripting that they use.
I only have C# express.
NSIS. http://nsis.sourceforge.net One section per application, install with ExecWait operation.
Section "BF 1942"
ExecWait '"$EXEDIR\1942\setup.exe"'
SectionEnd
The closest thing that I can think of would probably have to be iexpress.exe
It comes standard with 99% of all windows, just do CTRL+R and type in iexpress.exe.
It's a wizard, so it shouldn't be that hard to generate your own file.
I don't know if it would work for what you're wanting to do, but I'd consider it to be worth trying, saving yourself some time.
I have a unit testing framework for WP7 and it runs on the phone. The results are fairly hard to read so I am writing them to an XDocument.
My question is, how can I then get this XML file off of the phone and onto my desktop where I can actually analyze the results?
What I have done so far is to put a Debugger.Break() line right after where the summary xml is created. I can then copy/paste the xml out of VS or inspect it right in the debugger. The problem is though, that if you don't already have a debugger attached (which is good when lots of ExpectedException tests) Debugger.Attach() seems to not work, also manually attaching VS to the emulator processes seems to do nothing.
I tried running the emulator with some extra command line parameters so I could try to see if I could get it to use my actual hard drive as it's own disk but I couldn't seem to get it to work...
PS it's probably not reasonable to pop open a new process such as a webserver to listen for this data. I know how to do that, I would just rather not.
So how the heck do you get stuff off of these phones??
Have a look at this article about emulator automation from Justin Angel.
It includes details on how to remotely read and write files from/to emulator/device isolated storage.
As you pointed out the other alternative would be to have the applciation send the results to a [local] web server.
The article by Justin Angel is really great, but unfortunately his file-based solution does not work on the final RTM versions of the CoreCon API. Microsoft has simply removed that functionality from the native conman layer.
I've been in the same situation as you and have contemplated various ways to get data out of the device, but in the end only one thing seems to work: as you suggest yourself, pass data to an external webservice.
That solution is less than ideal not only because it takes some effort, but also because of a few caveats:
your app must be granted ID_CAP_NETWORKING capability
network-traffic seems disallowed in the Application_Closing event, and maybe elsewhere too
On the bright side I found that webrequests from the phone, both hardware and emulator, were really fast so the approach works very well (our app is EQATEC Profiler for WP7).
is there a way to notify user about a new version of plugin available?
This can be certainly done by writing some custom code to ping webservice, finding status and based on that displaying message, but then i am wondering if there is a predefined way/template available which can be used and achieved.
If you are sharing sample code, I like C#.
I think one of the best ways to achieve this without writing your own custom code is to use ClickOnce (or a ClickOnce alternative) - "ClickOnce applications can be self-updating; they can check for newer versions as they become available and automatically replace any updated files."
ClickOnce can be and is often used in conjunction with Office addins - for example, see http://robindotnet.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/how-do-i-programmatically-find-the-deployed-files-for-a-vsto-add-in/
Also, another question regarding open-source options to Click-Once might be a good idea - clickonce - what is a good open source alternative to clickonce? (DDay.Update)?
I need to create a patching routine for my application,
it's really small but I need to update it daily or weekly
how does the xdelta and the others work?
i've read around about those but I didn't understand much of it
the user shouldn't be prompted at all
Ok this post got flagged on meta for the answers given, so I'm going to weigh in on this.
xdelta is a binary difference program that, rather than providing you with a full image, only gives you what has changed and where. An example of a text diff will have + and - signs before lines of text showing you that these have been added or removed in the new version.
There are two ways to update a binary image: replace it using your own program or replace it using some form of package management. For example, Linux Systems use rpm etc to push out updates to packages. In a windows environment your options are limited by what is installed if you're not on a corporate network. If you are, try WSUS and MSI packaging. That'll give you an easier life, or ClickOnce as someone has mentioned.
If you're not however, you will need to bear in mind the following:
You need to be an administrator to update anything in certain folders as others have said. I would strongly encourage you to accept this behaviour.
If the user is an administrator, you can offer to check for updates. Then, you can do one of two things. You can download a whole new version of your application and write it over the image on the hard disk (i.e. the file - remember images are loaded into memory so you can re-write your own program file). You then need to tell the user the update has succeeded and reload the program as the new image will be different.
Or, you can apply a diff if bandwidth is a concern. Probably not in your case but you will need to know from the client program the two versions to diff between so that the update server gives you the correct patch. Otherwise, the diff might not succeed.
I don't think for your purposes xdelta is going to give you much gain anyway. Just replace the entire image.
Edit if the user must not be prompted at all, just reload the app. However, I would strongly encourage informing the user you are talking on their network and ask permission to do so / enable a manual update mode, otherwise people like me will block it.
What kind of application is this ? Perhaps you could use clickonce to deploy your application. Clickonce very easily allows you to push updates to your users.
The short story is, Clickonce creates an installation that allows your users to install the application from a web server or a file share, you enable automatic updates, and whenever you place a new version of the app on the server the app will automatically(or ask the user wether to) update the app. The clickonce framework takes care of the rest - fetching the update , figure out which files have changed and need to be downloaded again and performs the update. You can also check/perform the update programatically.
That said, clickonce leaves you with little control over the actual installation procedure, and you have nowhere close to the freedom of building your own .msi.
I wouldn't go with a patching solution, since it really complicates things when you have a lot of revisions. How will the patching solution handle different versions asking to be updated? What if user A is 10 revisions behind the current revision? Or 100 revisions, etc? It would probably be best to just download the latest exe(s) and dll(s) and replace them.
That said, I think this SO question on silent updates might help you.
There is a solution for efficient patching - it works on all platforms and can run in completely silent mode, without the user noticing anything. On .NET, it provides seamless integration of the update process using a custom UserControl declaratively bound to events from your own UI.
It's called wyUpdate.
While the updating client (wyUpdate) is open source, a paid for wybuild tool is used to build and publish the patches.
Depending on the size of your application, you'd probably have it split up into several dll's, an exe, and other files.
What you could do is have the main program check for updates. If updates are available, the main program would close and the update program would take over - updating old files, creating new ones, and deleting current files as specified by the instructions sent along with a patch file (probably a compressed format such as .zip) downloaded by the updater.
If your application is small (say, a single exe) it would suffice to simply have the updater replace that one exe.
Edit:
Another way to do this would be to (upon compilation of the new exe), compare the new one to the old one, and just send the differences over to the updater. It would then make the appropriate adjustments.
You can make your function reside in a separate DLL. So you can just replace the DLL instead of patching the whole program. (Assuming Windows as the target platform for a C# program.)