Need help in finding name of specific thing I'm trying to do

Question

I think it's possible to somehow hook with the windows environment (specifically explorer.exe) and trigger specific things, for example launching control panel and using it as if I had mouse (meaning I'm clicking the interface from the code).

Basically what I'm trying to do is automate some redundant tasks I do often, just I don't know how it's done, or even how it's called. Anyone can point me in right direction?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Windows Explorer has a COM object model that you can call from both C# and C++. (Most of the examples on MSDN are in Javascript or VBScript, which I guess aren't your languages of choice, but they demonstrate that the API is straightforward to call.)

Answer 2

AutoHotKey is a scripting environment specifically designed for this sort of task

Answer 3

Forget about "automated clicking". GUI tools are just front-ends to control the system. You can control the system like they do, it will be much easier.

1. Huge possibilities can give you Microsoft Management Console. Each "snap-in" can be accessed via COM model. Some of them have GUI front-ends, find and fire "*.msc" files (somewhere in Windows directory) to try them.

2. There is many command line tools i.e. "net" command has huge abilities related to networking.

3. PowerShell may be a better choice instead of C# or C++, it's designed for task automation. You can easily use COM, .NET, MMC ...

Answer 4

If you want mostly to launch control panel you can do using RunDll32 interface existing in the most control panel applets. See http://www.osattack.com/windows-7/huge-list-of-windows-7-shell-commands/ , http://support.microsoft.com/kb/167012 or http://www.winvistaclub.com/t57.html for example. For the corresponding API see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/164787.

Another option is usage of control.exe (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144191.aspx and http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/control.htm).

If you google more you will find much more examples which you can to automate a lot of things without using of some general ways to automate GUI.

Answer 5

At more or less the lowest level within Win32, you can use the SendMessage() API to send raw click messages to windows of interest. This will rely on a lot of intrusive knowledge about the apps you intend to drive. However, you could easily implement a "click recorder" that could replay click sequences captured from user interaction.