I want to build an application that displays the content that user types on the command prompt to the display like a presentation.
I am writing this application in golang. If there are existing libraries that I can use to do this great and if not would need direction how to approach solving this.
I did search on the internet for pointers but found none.
Have a look at the present tool, it does a similar thing using flat files and might even be useful for you.
https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/present
Related
I'm working on a go project for spreadsheet manipulation.
All the code of my main application is sorted, but I want to be able to add a feature where a user of my tool can select an option on the GUI, which leads to the excel file they have selected being opened, and allows them to interactively select ranges from the workbook, which are then retained and used by my tool in the rest of the program
The issue I'm finding is that, apart from a matlab library/function which can do this (https://uk.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/importtool.html) there don't seem to be any other options for this I can find. Using Matlab wouldn't be ideal for my purposes as I can't really compile it as an exe to be used on any computer (which is a big part of my goal)
I'm happy to try my hand at using another language in order to make use of any libraries there may be for it, particularly if they are libraries for a very commonly used language (C, C++ would be ideal)
Can anyone think of any useful examples which might be relevant to my aim?
I found that there were no obvious libraries perfect for this in any common language; the best option for this appears to be just using a Go library which can interact with COM to open a file and subsequently take input from interactions there, which will then have to be fed into the rest of my program
The Go Ole library seems the best for this https://github.com/go-ole/go-ole
This is likely not a simple topic - I have researched this to the best of my abilities and realize that it is not supported in any typical fashion.
My goal is to enable something similar to .app files from OSX, where the application, as well as its user data, can exist in the same file. I imagine it would require writing a tool to manage this behaviour, but this question is more about how to achieve this in the Windows OS. I am quite flexible regarding the implementation details, but the more straightforward the behaviour, the better (i.e. avoiding copying or compressing/decompressing entire directories/archives at runtime would be ideal).
Approaches I have considered:
Find a way to get explorer to treat a directory as a file, so that it can be associated. I have found a way to get explorer to treat a directory as a control panel item, I have thus far been unable to find a way to use this to associate a custom program. See the infamous "godmode hack" for Windows (name a directory something to the effect of "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}"). This one seems the most hopeful, but I'm at wits end trying to find information about creating a new association of this type.
Come up with some kind of archive format which can extract executable information to a temporary directory, launch this executable passing the archive as a commandline parameter. This seems like the ugliest solution, from a performance perspective. I would prefer a different solution if at all possible, one which doesn't involve making duplicates of the program or its data to run.
Find a way to associate a directory directly, though I have found no trace of this being supported in Windows, and I assume this is a dead-end.
Find a way to get an executable to include writeable embedded files. I have been unable to make any headway with this- I even tried a resource hacker approach, but obviously you cannot modify the assembly while its in use.
Tried to make a self-modifying JAR file with Java, but the route I took would add the JDK as a runtime requirement, which seems a bit overkill. Even then, it would be limited to Java, and I'm pretty sure it's not actually supposed to allow that in the first place.
Modify Windows Explorer. I shudder at the amount of work this would take, not to mention the at-best gray area it falls under legally. Perhaps there's a way to extend explorer to achieve this, I'm not sure.
A custom archive file. This seems like the most straightforward way to do it. But it would ideally need to be an archive format that has very little overhead for file I/O. Could even be some kind of virtual disk that gets mounted, but I am imagining that would be pretty heavy.
I would appreciate any insight that anyone has on this topic. I won't go into reasons as they are irrelevant to the question itself- I'm aware it is likely not the most practical solution to anything in particular. Consider it a novel pursuit.
It can be done by application virtualization,
Read this wikipedia page theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_application
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_virtualization
And two pages about software:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_ThinApp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_(software)
Windows 7 added the ability for a Desktop.ini file to add/change the folder verbs on a per-folder basis. Using that trick it is possible to create a "folders as applications" style setup.
I recently automated the creation of Powerpoint Presentations in a site I'm making. I found the Office Interop libraries extremely simple to use.
Office isn't built for this kind of thing in a webserver environment, so I'm looking at creating the Powerpoints using Open Office XML, only it's so extremely complex. For example I downloaded some code to create a blank presentation with some text. This code was around 300 lines! Using the Office Interop libraries I could do the same thing in just a couple of lines of code.
I don't have time, nor do I want to attempt to learn how to interact with the Open Office XML libraries, so I'm hoping someone has made a wrapper for the Open Office XML libraries. So far all my searching has only given me one result, Aspose Slides for .NET. This looks really hopeful, but it also looks rather expensive
Has anyone ever used a decent wrapper or alternative before?
If you are looking at automating the creation of Powerpoint presentation files, I'd say you continue with OpenXML, there's nothing better than it. Everything else is either paid or don't offer entire gamut of functionality that Open XML can provide.
If you find creating a blank file tedious, you could save an empty file somewhere and use that as a template for performing further operations on it.
The only thing close to a wrapper for PowerPoint I've found is the Open XML PowerTools. It includes a PresentationBuilder class which can be used for some specific tasks like combining slides from multiple PowerPoint documents into a new document. Although its pretty limited in its functionality you could extend the class.
However, I've come to the conclusion that there just is not a good wrapper out there so I've had to do what everybody pretty much recommends and that is using the Open XML SDK Productivity Tool and the Reflect code button.
I put together a basic presentation then Reflect Code and put that into a class. Yes its a lot of lines of code and its not the most elegant solution but it does work. Then from there I can extend or modify that class to do the specific things I need to do with each slide. The Productivity Tool is a big help for figuring out the code need to do specific things. I try to keep it simple and just do one or two things at a time, Reflect Code, then look at the code to see what it does.
You could try SoftArtisans PowerPointWriter, it has a template mode that allows you to start with an existing PowerPoint file with a few place holders, and merge your data with your presentation with as little as 5 lines of code.
Disclaimer: I work for SoftArtisans
i have an app that will be shipped by different providers. So i need to exchange the backgrounds etc, ss there is probably some kind of unique identifier for each app i also need different projects for that. What's the best practice to do this on windows phone ? Do i have to write own "Wrapper"-Projects ? (In iOS there is a concept called targets where i just link relevant branding files, appname, identifiers etc)
Thanks for your help !
In XAML, you can use Styling and Templating to dynamically change the whole look and feel of your application.
The same principal applies to Windows Phone apps as well. Then all you got to do is, maintain different style xaml files and apply them to create unique builds, or once the application launches.
Update: As willmel suggests below, which I forgot to mention, localization techniques mentioned here are a great way to maintain application strings.
Update 2: You can package your 'themes' into separate ZIP files, as demonstrated here and use post build events and VS commands to create different packages. You can always call msbuild from the command line as well and customize your build process even further. You can use different manifests this way as well.
If you have provider information which is language specified, you can download a sample project here:
http://www.pocketpc.ch/windows-phone-7-entwicklung/158405-textbox-string-integer.html#post1381376
or another here, or in VB
Once, you know the provider, you can select your resource file.
That article from Tim Heuer can show how you can work with less work for different situations like used in XCode iOS. Additional to strings you can use image URL as well.
I know that the web is full of questions like this one, but I still haven't been able to apply the answers I can find to my situation.
I realize there is VBA, but I always disliked having the program/macro living inside the Excel file, with the resulting bloat, security warnings, etc. I'm thinking along the lines of a VBScript that works on a set of Excel files while leaving them macro-free. Now, I've been able to "paint the first column blue" for all files in a directory following this approach, but I need to do more complex operations (charts, pivot tables, etc.), which would be much harder (impossible?) with VBScript than with VBA.
For this specific example knowing how to remove all macros from all files after processing would be enough, but all suggestions are welcome. Any good references? Any advice on how to best approach external batch processing of Excel files will be appreciated.
Thanks!
PS: I eagerly tried Mark Hammond's great PyWin32 package, but the lack of documentation and interpreter feedback discouraged me.
You could put your macros in a separate excel file.
Almost anything you can do in VBA to automate excel you can do in VBScript (or any other script/language that supports COM).
Once you have created an instance of Excel.Application you can pretty much drop your VBA into a VBS and go from there.
If it's the Excel/VBA capability that you're looking to use then you could always start by creating all of the code that will interact with the Excel files you're wanting to work on within an Excel file - a kind of master file that is separated from the regular files, as suggested by Karsten W.
This gives you the freedom to write Excel/VBA.
Then you can call your master workbook (which can be configured to run your code when the book is opened, for example) from a VB script, batch file, Task Scheduler, etc.
If you want to get fancy, you can even use VBA in your master file to create/modify/delete custom macros/VBA modules in any of the target files that you're processing.
The info for just about all of the techniques I'm describing I got from the Excel VBA built-in reference docs, but it certainly helps to be familiar with the specific programming tasks that you're tackling. I'd advise that the best approach is to put together your tasks (eg, make column blue, update/sort data etc) one by one and then worry about the automation at the end.