Question

I would like to create a command line application in C# where users could use it as a script language. By this I mean upon the first run of the application, an instance of an object is created, and persists throughout the rest of the session. Any subsequent calls of the application from the command line use parameters set previously.

For instance if you had an application called woo.exe, which created an object called ball. Ball has a method called changeColor which accepts a string as input. Our command line call for changeColor would be.

woo changeColor red

Now if ball had a method getColor() which returned the color of the ball object, calling the command

woo getColor
Your color is red (output that comes from Console.WriteLine(“Your color is {0}”, color))

This way the user could create batch files to run methods on a single object through multiple calls of the program.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

One possible way would be:

• call woo.exe, create object
• now woo.exe finishes, right? Serialize object to disk in any convenient format (I would choose XML as it is expressive and easy to parse in C#)
• woo.exe is called again with new parameters. Load object, make changes, serialize again.

Another possible way:

• woo.exe is loaded first time, creates object and waits.
• another instance is loaded, find first instance via inter-process communications (pipes or local network) and sends command (calls method) to it.
• first instance act like a server, holds the objects and executes changes to it.