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[.net] External program API

Started by e-u-l-o-g-y Jun 6, 2006 at 10:54 AM 11 replies 1.7k views

Original Post

Jun 6, 2006 at 10:54 AM

Hi! Does anybody know of any good tutorials on programming an API for a .NET application? I would like to make it possible to access a program object, and thereby have direct control of the program. Any suggestions? -Thanks in advance

Enselic

Jun 6, 2006 at 3:53 PM

Maybe the word '.NET assembly' is what you are looking for?

e-u-l-o-g-y

Author

e-u-l-o-g-y

Jun 7, 2006 at 11:27 AM

Oh... sorry... I was a bit tired when I wrote the message.. what I meant was an external API to control the program like for instance photoshop has. I would like to have a couple of functions that gives you access to the application object from other programs.

Bob Janova

Jun 7, 2006 at 1:42 PM

Just expose the application object (whatever you mean by that) as a public property of something (something static maybe?). Then any application that can use your assembly can access it. I don't quite know what you mean by 'have direct control of the program', but a standard .Net library is usable from other programs with nothing special.

e-u-l-o-g-y

Author

e-u-l-o-g-y

Jun 7, 2006 at 4:03 PM

Hmm... ok... I'll try to explain a bit better: I have two different projects. One that contains a gui application, and one command line tool that makes it possible to manipulate the first program while it's running. I want the command line tool as well as any other program that includes an API assembly to be able to communicate with the instances of the gui program.

I expect the usage to look a bit like this:

foreach (GuiApplication app in GuiApplication.RunningInstances){   app.PerformSomeAction();}

Palidine

199

Palidine

Jun 7, 2006 at 4:08 PM

may be a better way but you could always just write a little server in the main app. Then write a little API that communicates with the main app's server via sockets. The little API would have hooks for sending appropriately formatted data streams to the main app's server which would then execute them within the main app. Likewise you could have method calls which would query for info from the main app such as getting a list of objects and such.

-me

e-u-l-o-g-y

Author

e-u-l-o-g-y

Jun 10, 2006 at 7:40 AM

Palidine: That might be a solution, but It's a bit hack-ish. I was hoping there's a way to retrieve managed objects from a running program, but there's perhaps no simple way?

Rob Loach

219

Rob Loach

Jun 10, 2006 at 9:41 AM

I wrote a little article on Plugin Interfaces in .NET a little while ago that covers how to implement a plugin archatecture into a .NET environment. In this case, your GUI application would be a plugin to the main console application. When you write a command into the console, you could call a function in the GUI Application (IPlugin).

Arild Fines

138

Arild Fines

Jun 10, 2006 at 10:38 AM

Have your GUI application expose an interface via remoting. Then your application can be accessed like this:

IApplication app = (IApplication)Activator.GetObject(typeof(IApplication), "tcp://localhost:1234/Application");app.DoStuff();

e-u-l-o-g-y

Author

e-u-l-o-g-y

Jun 11, 2006 at 8:57 AM

Rob Loach:
I've done something similar, but the problem with this approach is that the gui part of the program is dependent on the console part, which is undesirable in my situation, since I consider the console part to be an external tool.

Arild Fines:
Now that seems interesting.. Could you elaborate on how it works?

BradSnobar

Jun 11, 2006 at 4:53 PM

I suggest putting all of your functionality into a dll, and then calling that dll from your main application.

Another good solution is to create a three tier design, with your access api in the middle tier. You might want to look up n-tier design.

By the way, a good way to learn about api is to read a good database book, or to look at already existing api that you like. Basically api have several kinds of methods for every action.
Get
Set
Remove
Update

Make sure that you use a naming scheme that you can continue to use moving into the future. Ie.) what do you call the method names in version 2, so that nothing breaks in version 1?

Make sure that you stay consistent with your naming convention and the order of parameters.

Have fun.

e-u-l-o-g-y

Author

e-u-l-o-g-y

Jun 12, 2006 at 6:25 AM

BradSnobar:
I'll google "n tier design" as it sounds a bit like what I was planning on. I'm not really having any problems with designing the API. The problem is getting an object from another process. Exposing functionality in an assembly is definately the way to go, but it doesn't help with this problem. For instance making a static Application object won't make THAT instance accessible to another program.

Arild Fines

138

Arild Fines

Jun 12, 2006 at 9:54 AM

Quote:
Original post by e-u-l-o-g-y
Arild Fines:
Now that seems interesting.. Could you elaborate on how it works?

I can give an example that's in the wild: Draco .NET. It contains of several components, the primary of which is a Windows Service which performs the actual build operations (Draco .NET is a continuous integration/build tool). The other components are a console app, a GUI app and an ASP.NET app. All these latter three communicate with the service through remoting, in order to start and stop builds.

The remoting object is here and is configured in OnStart() here based on the configuration file here.

The console client has numerous examples of using the remote interface.

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