How to control the mouse pointer outside our application

Question

Hi, I want to control the mouse pointer with my application and be able to interact with other programs using my program, For example I want my application to be able to click on a button on another application

How should I go about solving this problem? (Any programming language would work, also if you have any suggestion please let me know)

Afterthoughts: I want to do it in windows operating system and want to test my GUI to see if it works in different scenarios. Any language would work for me since this is not part of the final product but I prefer one of these languages (Python, Java, C# or MATLAB)

Thanks

Answer 1

There are many ways of doing this, and you didn't mention any details of your application (system, target goal, etc...).

If your goal is menial automation, I'd recommend whipping together a quick AutoIt script on Windows. http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml

If this isn't what you're looking for, please give more details.

Answer 2

Okay, this one is really operating system and windowing specific. But the phrase you're looking for is "mouse grabbing".

As @Mitch suggests, unless you've got a really good reason — like maybe a GUI testing app? — then grabbing the mouse and messing with it in that way is very bad form.