Question

I am writing an application that has both CLI and GUI.

I read most questions and articles regarding it, and found highly usefull this question:

Can one executable be both a console and GUI application?

My final code looks like:

        if (args.Length > 0)
        {
            //console code            
        }
        else
        {
            FreeConsole();
            Application.EnableVisualStyles();
            Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
            Application.Run(new Form());
        } 

This works great when running the .exe by double click, or when debugging, or from console with arguments.

However, when running it from the console with no arguments, the GUI is opened, like I intended, but the console is stuck waiting for the GUI to close.

This is uncharacteristic GUI and console behavior. the console usually launch the GUI and not wait to its exit, but for new commands.

Is there is a way to avoid it?

Answer 1

The accepted answer in the question you linked to contains this passage:

Junfeng’s second technique is what ildasm uses. He quotes the process
that ildasm’s author went through when making it run in both modes.
Ultimately, here’s what the it does:

The program is marked as a console-mode binary, so it always starts
out with a console. This allows input and output redirection to work
as normal. If the program has no console-mode command-line parameters,
it re-launches itself. It’s not enough to simply call FreeConsole to
make the first instance cease to be a console program. That’s because
the process that started the program, cmd.exe, “knows” that it started
a console-mode program and is waiting for the program to stop running.
Calling FreeConsole would make ildasm stop using the console, but it
wouldn’t make the parent process start using the console.

To me it looks like the headache of having a binary trying to switch between the console subsystem and GUI subsystem (which really isn’t allowed) is more effort than it’s worth.

One approach would be to have a separate GUI application .exe. Whenever the console app is started without parameters it launches the GUI app and closes itself.

To prevent code duplication this probably requires all the actual logic of the application to be put in a separate class library.