Design Patterns or Good ways to solve the problem - c#

I need to develop an application in Winform C# and trying to find out suitable design pattern for this application.
Basically, My application Interacts with couple of Exes and output is monitored and based on the output, user will click button to trigger another console application (as shown in fig).
Right now, I have written separate class for every console application with which my application is interacting.
What are best ways to solve this problem (using Design Patterns).
Thank you,
Harsha

Are the Console App from 3d?
If not, You are able to create another Project(DLL) with the methods of that apps, and use it on your Winforms app.

Related

Is there a way to combine Console and GUI applications in C#?

HOMEWORK:
Over the course of the semester, I have created about a dozen applications in C#. While most of them are console applications, three of them are GUI apps. As a final project, our instructor has asked us to create a portfolio program which displays a menu from which the user can select which console application to run.
Being the overachiever that I am, I would like to create a single program that would allow the user to select ANY program created during the semester, console OR GUI.
While I've found a lot of q&a's that address allowing a program to run EITHER as a GUI or Console, I'm not sure those are quite applicable to my situation. This link and this link seem to most CLOSELY match what I'm trying to do. Part of the problem is that we're just starting to scratch the surface of GUI programming this semester, so I don't know a lot of what I don't know. This makes it difficult to ask the right questions and determine how relevant a link is.
My approach is to create a GUI menu. Some of the menu items would launch a Console app inside a Console window, and some of the menu items would launch their respective GUI apps. Does anyone have any practical advice or relevant links that would help guide me to a solution?

Run code once and exit formless app: Windows Forms or WPF... does it matter?

I need to write a very small application which writes some system data to a file and then exits. I could do this in a console application but I have no need or desire for a console window to appear during this process.
I would normally use a Windows Forms application with no forms, execute the code in the Main method and then allow the application to exit, however, this time I couldn't help but wonder if this is the best way to do it and whether you could do it with a WPF application instead, what the differences are and whether or not once you've remove any forms/windows and unnecessary reference, it matters or not.
WPF and WinForms are two different libraries that show UIs.
If you never show a UI, you aren't using either of them.
You should start with a WinForms project (WPF projects set extra project metadata that you don't want), then delete the reference to System.Windows.Forms.dll.
Alternatively, start with a console project, then change the Output type to Windows Application.
Windows Forms with no window or console app with the type changes to windows application will give you the same result which is a simple app with Main() method and now windows.
WCF will only make sense if you actually want to display something as you're not going to use any of its features in your case.

How to get a value of a RadioButton from a WinForm application that I don't have an API for?

I have a small calculation system that will be installed in multiple PCs. Those PCs have a program installed in them and this program is always open (but minimized).
I need to get the value of a 'RadioButton' in this program but I can't access it!
I've tried to get an API for this application but the company developed it refused to co-operate. I've got a crazy idea, you can refer to my question regarding this idea Click It and the last thing is to get the cache for the button but I think this is going to work with WebApplications only!
Any help would be Great! =) .. And btw I decided to build my application as web application but then I changed my mind to build it as a WinForms because of the screenshot. But if I got a better and a more clean solution I'd go back to WebApp
Screen grabbing is not a good option. You should be able to use FindWindow based methods to get hold of the radio button if the app uses windowed controls. If not then UI Automation may very well be able to get the value of the radio button. Whatever it's usually possible to read UI state out of another application with methods like this, and much easier than screen scraping.

Create separate window from Console Application

I'm having a bit of a trouble trying to create a multi window'ed console application. Currently, my application's main console window is used to collect user input and display output.
Much of this output comes from a separate thread, as live data comes in. I was wondering if there is a way for me to separate my application into two windows, where the second window was either a console window or even any other kind of window that could display the text of the incoming strings... In particular, the main console window would be where the user input commands etc, and the second window displayed what the system was currently working on. This second window could be entirely readonly.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I would post code, but I don't really have anything relevant (that I can think of) to post....
This will be hard to do.
Here is answer for similar question: Can you have multiple .net Consoles (as in Console.Writeline)
If you really want to do it, you can find logic here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/MultipleConsoles.aspx
Maby better approach will be to start another process (console app) and communicate between them thru IPC ( Interprocess communication ) - like named pipes .
More about IPC you can find: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/01/wcf-comm-options
It is probably easier to just pop-up a Windows Form with a TextBox containing the data you wish to show. You can simply start a new thread and call Form.ShowDialog() to get the form to show.

In C#, can you make a windows form application start as a service?

I have a GUI C# Windows form program that I would like to start as a service when the computer starts and perhaps have an icon in the system tray that when clicked maximizes the program. Is this possible without major rework?
Thanks
Windows Services cannot have a GUI, at least not directly. You will have to separate your application to a presentation layer/process and a service layer/process:
The presentation layer will remain a WinForms application
The service layer will run as a Windows Service
The two of them will have to communcate with each other with some means of inter-process communcation, like named pipes or sockets.
You can use a third party app, such as FireDaemon (http://www.firedaemon.com/), to start any program as a service. There are many options available in FireDaemon, such as form visibility, restart on failure, etc. However, it will not automatically create a tray icon for your app. So your app will have to be changed to have its own tray icon functionality and FireDaemon will just start the program and manage the process.
FireDaemon costs about $40 (USD). I imagine there are many other similar applications available.
I would first look into creating an actual service project as mentioned by other answerers, but keep this approach in mind. It has worded well for me in a handful of situations.
It depends on how the code is currently written. I have several WinForm apps that double as services, but the bulk of the work I have separated into another assembly. My solutions for those apps generally have 3 projects: WinApp, Service, and Library (I'm oversimplifying here).
If you feel that your WinForm app could make a good service then you probably have your code in such a state that you could probably separate it out easily enough. Adding a service project is pretty simple, adding the installer for it is a little more challenging but still well documented. The trickiest part is making a deployment package for it that installs the service properly, but again... its well documented as long as you know you need to look for it.
Edit: Just to clarify, in general I wouldn't consider this a major project.
You can write the code to have it run as a service, but I think the more important question is, what does it provide? There are ways of minimizing an application to the tray, and you can start said applications at launch to the system tray.
This is the link that I always refer back to about doing windows services. It is WCF based, but I think with a little modification you could make it work for you:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317421
As to minimizing to a tray, there's an excellent answer in this question:
What's the proper way to minimize to tray a C# WinForms app?
You could use Task Manager within windows and setup a task that would execute your application's .exe per windows boot.

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