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.NET Forum / Languages / C# / March 2008How to automate another application?
I have an application I want to automate. I don't believe it has COM automation (how do I tell?) Is there a .NET counterpart to COM automation? If so, how would I determine if this application supports it? The only way I can think to automate it is to enumerate all the windows on the system in a combo box, have the user select one and then send WM_LDOUBLECLICK and WM_KEYDOWN via pinvoking sendMessage or PostMessage (which one?) to the application. Is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Siegfried On Mar 13, 12:18 am, Siegfried Heintze <SiegfriedHein...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote: > I have an application I want to automate. I don't believe it has COM > automation (how do I tell?) Look for an associated type library. It will either be in a seperate file called xxxx.tlb, or bound into the executable ... but see later. > Is there a .NET counterpart to COM automation? If so, how would I determine > if this application supports it? Yes, there is (sort of). You can call a function in one process from another process (search for "Remoting"). The easy way to find if the application supports it, is to try and add a reference to the applicaton .exe in your project. Conveniently, this will work for COM automation as well. > The only way I can think to automate it is to enumerate all the windows on > the system in a combo box, have the user select one and then send > WM_LDOUBLECLICK and WM_KEYDOWN via pinvoking sendMessage or PostMessage > (which one?) to the application. SendMessage won't return until the application has handled the message, PostMessage will return immediately, and wait for the application to handle it eventually. > Is there a better way to do this? Possibly not, but this is fragile. If the user clicks somewhere you aren't expecting you will get grief. If the next release of the application re-orders controls on the user interface you will get grief. If some of the inputs depend on WM_CHAR rather than WM_KEYDOWN you will get grief. Oh. The other approach is to ask the vendors of the application if there is some way to automate it.
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