it's a .NET non GUI application. It is specified as a console application, but the console is not really used. what the application does is GUI testing of other applications
+1
A:
You would have to have your main thread waiting on Console.Read() (or Console.ReadKey()) all the time and do the actual work on another thread. When the main thread detects a keypress it needs to somehow notify the other thread to pause or resume (eg. using a WaitHandle).
If the worker thread is doing something really simple and it's safe to suspend it at any time then you may be able to just suspend/resume the thread itself rather than doing any notifications.
Evgeny
2010-07-15 03:59:21
but this would only work if the console has focus, am I right? but in my application this is difficult since the tested GUI usually has the focus (actually almost all of the time)
Louis Rhys
2010-07-15 04:03:34
Yes, you're right - if doesn't have focus then you'd have to register a global hotkey, as overslacked says.
Evgeny
2010-07-15 07:07:52
A:
It'd be nice if the Console class supported other events wouldn't it? :)
To do work and have a responsive program, I imagine you could have a loop constantly polling the KeyAvailable property for any input. Then probably have another separate thread doing the actual work. If a key becomes available, you can force the worker thread to sleep (pause) or wake (continue). Otherwise if there is none, you could update the console with the status. For a single threaded system, you might want to throw in some yields in there and some timers to prempively yield your worker thread.
Jeff M
2010-07-15 04:15:50
KeyAvailable will not work when the console does not have focus when the key is pressed, will it?
Louis Rhys
2010-07-15 04:20:19
The program will be running whether it is focused (active) or not.It's a boolean and remains false until a key is pressed.
Jeff M
2010-07-15 04:25:08
Yes, that's the point of having the worker thread. The main thread and the worker thread would be running simultaneously effectively.
Jeff M
2010-07-15 04:48:55
+2
A:
Others have described how you'd start/stop the problem execution ... for the actual key trapping, I'd suggest registering a global hotkey - but, you'd need to have a Windows form handle available to you, so I'd also suggest either launching your command-line utility from a GUI app, or simply including the functionality in a GUI app.
Is this kind of change possible?
EDIT: Christian Liensberger has made what looks like an excellent wrapper for this on his blog.
overslacked
2010-07-15 04:19:25