Question

I’m currently developing an application that does some file manipulation and I want to be able to do the manipulation through the console or via an UI (I chose WPF).

I pretty much want to say: (psuedo)

if ( Environment.GetCommandLineArgs().Length > 0 )
{
    //Do not Open WPF UI, Instead do manipulate based
    //on the arguments passed in
}
else
{
    //Open the WPF UI
}

I’ve read about a few different ways of starting the WPF Window/application programmatically like:

Application app = new Application ();
app.Run(new Window1());

But I’m not entirely sure I want to just plug this into a Console Application.

Does anyone have best practices or recommendations on how I can achieve this? The main processing functionality is in a Helper class I created. So basically I either want a static start method (like standard Console Application creates) or the UI to access the Helper class depending on the arguments passed in.

Answer 1

In Application class there is an event “StartUp” you can use it . It provide you the args you provide through command prompt. Here is an example from MSDN:

App.xaml

<Application x:Class="WpfApplication99.App"
         xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
         xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
         Startup="App_Startup">
</Application>

App.xaml.cs

public partial class App : Application
{
    void App_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
    {
        // Application is running
        // Process command line args
        bool startMinimized = false;
        for (int i = 0; i != e.Args.Length; ++i)
        {
            if (e.Args[i] == "/StartMinimized")
            {
                startMinimized = true;
            }
        }

        // Create main application window, starting minimized if specified
        MainWindow mainWindow = new MainWindow();
        if (startMinimized)
        {
            mainWindow.WindowState = WindowState.Minimized;
        }
        mainWindow.Show();
    }
}

I hope this will help.