Is it possible to build a Console app that does not display a console Window when double-clicked?

Answer 1

Just build it as a Windows Forms app, but don't give it a GUI. Unfortunately then you won't get any console output when it's run from the command line either... is that a problem?

Answer 2

Would this be more like a Service then?

• or -

What About a Windows Forms application that doesn't have a visible form? It would still show up in the Task Manager Processes list.

Answer 3

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/510805/can-a-win32-console-application-detect-if-it-has-been-run-from-the-explorer-or-no

Or I think the official way is to check the parent process is cmd.exe or explorer.exe

Answer 4

So, I've written tools with both a GUI and a CLI. The hard part was figuring out which one to open - in our case, though, the CLI version had required parameters, so I just opened the GUI if there weren't any parameters. Then, if they did want a console, call a function that looks something like:

private const int ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS = -1;
private const int ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE = 6;
[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
static extern bool AttachConsole(int dwProcessId);
[DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
static extern bool AllocConsole();
[DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
static extern bool FreeConsole();

private static bool StartConsole()
{
  if (!AttachConsole(ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS)) // try connecting to an existing console  
  {  
      if (Marshal.GetLastWin32Error() == ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE) // we don't have a console yet  
      {  
          if (!AllocConsole()) // couldn't create a new console, either  
              return false;  
      }
      else
          return false; // some other error
  }
  return true;
}

Returns whether the console was created. Don't forget to FreeConsole() when you're done!

In our case, of course, if we don't create a console, we create a GUI. It'd be just as easy to create either a console or no UI, though.

EDIT: That totally didn't answer the question in the edit that wasn't there when I started writing that, of course. Other than that our hack was just checking whether it was called with command-line parameters or not.