what's a good way to scripting or creating programs unders windows?
How about python?
You will need Notepad, and to learn JScript (not Javascript... JScript), VBScript or Batch. Then you can easily create small scripts, somewhat equivalent to bash shell scripts on Linux.
For the first two, you can read the Windows Script Host documentation.
Windows Powershell is becoming the new Windows scripting language. Being a full .NET language, it is inevitably much more powerful that the horrible old batch scripts one used to have to write (and still retains much of the syntactic sugar of scripting/shell languages).
You can do VBScript without the need to install anything.
Open notepad and enter the following text:
MsgBox "Hello"
Save it as filename.vbs
Double click the file you just created, congratulations - you just created and ran a VBScript.
I'd like to plug AutoIt. It's a free download and comes with it's own editor that can be quickly/easily installed anywhere. The language is very rich and comes with a large library of user defined functions. Integrated context-sensitive help with syntax display. There's even a GUI editor. A final plus is that it compiles to .exe so will run on any win2k/xp/vista/2k3/2k8/7 PC.
I always use Python for scripting on Windows.
A vague question usually gets a vague response.
Download a compiler or interpreter and find a tutorial.
With more information we can better point you in the right direction
I would say there are three clever choices here:
Scripting: Use JSCRIPT because much of what you learn about JSCRIPT can be used in Javascript. You can either graduate to Javascript/AJAX in the browser, or Microsoft .HTA apps.
Or, you could use Python because it has standard modules to do just about anything a sysadmin would do plus addons to access Windows .COM objects and WMI. You can then either graduate to Python on a UNIX platform, Jython (which is Python in the JVM) or IronPython which opens up the entire world of .NET for you.
And there is of course, the non-scripting choice which is about creating programs under Windows. If you choose this you probably have an end-game in mind that is beyond scripting, so start with SharpDevelop and IronPython. Then, as you gain confidence, start working with C# still using the same Sharpdevelop toolset. With this choice you can also graduate to UNIX applications using the MONO .NET environment although if you want to do GUI apps on UNIX you will need to use GTK# instead of Windows Forms.
Related
Similar to this question What programming languages are installed by default on Windows 7?. Is the environment any differnt for Windows 10?
For some programs like MS OFfice you get the VBA, Chrome you would get Javascript, if you activate the Bash for Ubuntu on Windows then you can get bash. Not sure if that is default.
In particular, if you didn't have administration rights over a Windows 10 laptop but needed a programming language... what could you use or do about it?
ie I wanted Ruby installed but I needed our tech team to help me. I want to avoid someone else with higher access but also not breach policy.
Out of the box no install solutions include:
(To be written using text file editing software like the preinstalled notepad)
Batch (.bat)
Visual basic script (.vbs)
HTML (.html)
CSS (^Use a style tag for the HTML doc)
JavaScript (.js)
Some quick gets include:
Bash (Ubuntu from Windows Store)
AutoHotKey (from autohotkey.com)
#Code (Windows Store. Apparently supports 12 different languages)
Hope this helps!
Edit: If you really wanna try, you can edit .exe files directly but yeesh.
Edit 2: repl.it is a website that lets you code in tons of different languages, possibly Ruby. With repl.it you can do all the things I've listed and more! (As long as you have alright internet.)
what could you use
You could use pretty much any languages. Any compiled executables looks the same to the OS as any other.
The only catch is that some languages' runtime libraries are quite big, so it's common for smaller programs not to include the entire language runtime and instead expects it to be preinstalled on the machine to keep its own download size small.
However, even high level scripting languages that requires huge runtime support libraries can often be packaged into standalone executable, so that you don't need to install the runtime yourself.
Ultimately it depends on what you wanted to do. If you wanted to just make simple scripts, probably .bat scripts will do just fine. If you wanted something simple and fast, then you can write native executable in C, otherwise if you want to do something a bit more complex and you're fine with the larger download size if you can keep your own program simple, or if you can later get admin to preinstall your preferred runtime on your target machines, then high level languages like Python or Ruby would be great options.
Is there someone that can suggest me a programming language that allows you to write quickly GUI programs (on windows platform)?
P.S. I am interested on only languages that do not rely on virtual machines and then have a compiler that produces executable code directly on the machine
I would go with AutoIT, it's a very easy to learn windows scripting language with tons of functionalities: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml
I'm using it to automate some tasks, but it can do way more than that.
EDIT
Just to make things a little bit clearer for everybody:
You can create new applications using AutoIT and the Aut2Exe compiler provided. The .exe files created are stand-alone, thus require no other files but the files that you might need in your app. Everything is free and the AutoIT scripting language has a BASIC-like syntax.
The GUI that you'll use are standard Windows controls. Among the functionalities you have the possibility to automate keystrokes/mouse movements, call the Windows API and external .dlls, manipulate windows and processes and through user created libraries (called UDFs) you can even acces local databases, manage networking tasks, encryption, archiving and many more.
All I can say is that it's worth take a look and the first app I built with AutoIT was done in roughly 8 hours since I started learning. It took a folder as the source and copied everything in a chosen directory, copying files in folders named as the date when the files were created. So the destination directory would have a series of subfolders like:
11.11.2010
whatever.txt
whatever.png
12.11.2010
archive.zip
and so on. Just 8 hours and got me rid of a lot of effort ordering the files myself.
Any .NET will probably be what you're after.
Start with VB.NET which is now called Visual Basic CCYY eg (Visual Basic 2005, Visual Basic 2008, Visual Basic 2010).
If you want something not using .NET framework, you might as well go back to older version of VB and if you want something compilable that'd be like C++ with their MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class).
You need to give more info on the type of gui and what you're using it for. This could be accomplished with Microsoft Access forms and VBA, or you could make an HTML Application (.hta).
I'll put in a vote for Delphi. You can easily write applications by dragging and dropping components on to a form and doing minimal coding in Pascal, which isn't hard to learn. Later, if you decide to go deeper, you can do pretty much whatever you want. And it compiles to native executable code.
Is an executable bundler, that combines the script with the framework/interpreter, good enough?
If so, you might look at Tcl/Tk or Lua.
http://www.powerbasic.com/
http://www.powerbasic.com/aboutpb.asp
Seems like it has a RAD GUI and of course it's BASIC, plus it compiles down to .exe (as I understand it.) Might be worth checking out.
A 'quick and simple' language will only allow you to do 'quick and simple' things - and for those, having a VM or not wont make much of a difference to you.
For quick and simple & native code, about all I can think of is RealBasic. Its cross platform Windows/Mac/Linux. I find their IDE to be difficult to work with due to its inflexibility and the help system last I looked wasnt that great, but the underlying language isnt bad and does compile to native code. So it might do the trick for you.
I'd like to do some light data processing - a little binary data manipulation followed by conversion to text serialization. The result is written to a file, and processed by an external program (run by my program). The data processing is more than I'd care to consider doing in batch files.
I'd prefer to use a scripting language, but not have to install the language first. The target computers are mostly older Windows boxes, which are disconnected from the network (no updates, such as PowerShell)
I'm not familiar with the various language's tools for creating EXE files. Which ones have solutions that work well and don't produce huge files? (i.e., whole interpreter package plus my script.)
For my money (its free) AutoIt 3 is exactly what your looking for. AutoIt produces relatively (250k is the standard overhead) small stand alone exes. It has a full perl like regex engine so your light data processing should be a breeze (I've written some pretty heavy data processing scripts in it myself). When downloading autoit be sure to get the full version including Scite this makes compile to exe a one click operation.
I know I might get flamed for this, but VB 6 is a viable option. Since XP SP2 (I think, possibly earlier), Windows has come with its runtimes installed. Not sure about vista.
Theres also the Windows Scripting Host that uses VBScript and JScript.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Script_Host
Lua is an excellent choice for that kind of stuff. You can integrate it in your executable or use the standalone Lua interpreter to run your scripts.
While waiting for answers I ran across Shoes, which can make Ruby .exe (I'm most familiar with Ruby) I got it mostly working, although the size of 2.4MB was a bit larger than I'd like. However, I found that it would crash when changing application focus.
I switched to a 'regular' terminal script, and found rubyscript2exe, which, after working around a problem with rubygems, seems to work, and creates a ~700kb file.
I did rather like some of the options presented, but it's not worth redeveloping at this point.
Python with py2exe. Depends on what you mean by small though.
Would using PowerShell script be something you've considered. The data processing might be richer there.
Why not knock up a .NET application? There are free editions of the IDE, and the Framework comes with Windows as a standard component (which also includes a C# compiler, as it happens.)
I want a small (< 30MB) standalone Windows executable (a single file) that creates a window which asks the user for the location of a directory and then launches a different program in that directory.
This executable has to run on XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008 versions of Windows in 32-bits and 64 bits on x86-64 architecture as well as Itanium chips.
It would be spectacular if we only had to build it once in order to run it on all these platforms, but that is not a requirement. This is for a proprietary system, so GPL code is off-limits.
What is the fastest way to put this together?
These are some things I'm looking into, so if you have info about their viability, I'm all about it:
Perl/Tk using perl2exe to get the binary.
Ruby with wxruby
Learn MFC programming and do it the right way like everybody else.
What about a WSH script? It won't be an exe, right, but to ask for a folder I don't see the need for an exe file, much less a 30Mb one...
A 1Kb script, save it as whatever name you like with vbs extension and run it. This, in case it's not clear, asks you for a folder name and then runs calc.exe from the system32 subdirectory. You can of course do a lot better than this in 2 or 4 Kb.
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
win = InputBox("Please type your Windows folder location.")
If Right(win,1) <> "\" Then
win = win & "\"
End If
WshShell.Run win & "system32\calc.exe"
To add a Folder Browser dialog instead of an InputBox, check this out.
Clear benefits are:
Simplicity (well, VB is ugly, but you can use JScript if you prefer), no need to compile it!
Compatibility, works on every windows machine I have available (from 98 onwards)
I'd use .NET and WinForms. The idea of scripted solution is appealing, but in practice I often find you end up jumping through hoops to do anything beyond the basic case and still don't have the flexibility to do everything you want.
Quickest way on Windows for a lightweight and fast GUI? One word.. Delphi! It lacks the 64 bit support for now but then FreePascal would come to the rescue.
Having a small stand-alone application and developing it quickly are, I'm sorry to say, usually conflicting requirements.
To be honest, given how incredibly simple the application is, I would write it in C with direct Win32 calls: one call to SHBrowseForFolder() to get the directory, and one to ShellExecuteEx() to run the program. Even MFC is far too heavy-weight for such a modest application. Set the C runtime to be statically linked and you should be able to keep the size of the stand-alone executable to less than 100k. A decent Windows C coder should be able to knock that up in less than an hour, assuming you have one to hand.
Python with either wxWidgets or Tkinter should be able to do this with almost no effort at all. Runs on everything, and py2exe will get you a standalone executable.
Tcl/tk is one solution. You can have a single file executable (including custom images, dlls, etc) using something called a "starpack" -- a virtual filesystem that is both tcl interpreter and application code. I think it would weigh in at maybe a couple megabytes.
From your specifications it would take me personally maybe 15 minutes to get a first working version.
Tcl/Tk has a BSD license.
For all of its flaws, Visual Basic has historically been great for super-simple apps like this.
I agree with the Tcl/Tk answer above. For more information about the starpack that he refers to, see: http://www.equi4.com/tclkit/ it's a Tcl/Tk interpreter available for various OS's all in about 1MB. In the past there apparently has been concerned about the look and feel of Tcl/Tk UI's, but this has been addressed by a new framework named "Tile" that supports the native look and feel of the user's OS.
For a quick and dirty GUI program like you said, you can use an AutoIt script. You can even compile to an exe.
For an GUI example of AutoIt, you can check my stdout redirect script in a previous answer here
wxWidgets; it's cross platform, free, open source and easy to learn
You could do this in MFC and have an executable in under 100k. In general, if you want to keep the size of your executables down, you can use UPX to perform exe compression. If you want an example, take a look at uTorrent. It's a full featured BitTorrent app in less than 300k of executable.
I use HTA (HTML Application) for quick-and-dirty form & script applications. See Microsoft's HTA Developers Center for details and examples. This basically uses HTML for the form, and any HTML-accessible scripting language for the script. Normal browser security is bypassed so that you can get at almost all OS internals. The above site also contains links to several tools that nearly automate the scripting part for you.
PyQt works really well for this. Binaries for Windows here:
http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/download
A good book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Python-Prentice-Software-Development/dp/0132354187/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295369454&sr=8-1
And you can freeze these using various methods if you need exe(s).
Similar to what Vinko Vrsalovic said, you can use a HTA application. It is as easy as building a webpage with windows scripting host functionality. I have built a few utilities with jscript and it is really easy and quick
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496(VS.85).aspx
These responses are unbelievable.
Visual Studio Forms editor lets you draw out WinForms and autogenerates the boilerplate GUI code (which is a pain in the ass at best for most other languages and toolkits). Then you can use C# or any other .NET language. .NET has stock widgets for file pickers. I could write that script in 20 minutes and it will run on every one of your target platforms for free. Draw out the GUI, drag-n-drop a file picker, fill out maybe two hooks to do the "launch a different file than they wanted" thing, done.
I suggest Autohotkey (AHK) or Autoit. Both support win95+ (with caveats for certain functions). They can be compiled into small .exe without external dependency (besides native DLL's).
Pros:
small size
easy to write code
useful for simple - complex operations
can create GUI easily
Cons:
learning curve (as syntax is unusual)
30MB is pretty huge!
Qt (C++) may be the best choice. It is portable, quick to develop and relatively fast to run. With UPX (Ultimate Packer for eXecutables) your program will be 10M+.
Qt (Python) is OK too, but will be slower.
If you want it less than 1M and/or you want it quick, you can write it in C with win32 api, or use Delphi.
For certain programs nothing beats the command line. Unfortunately, I have never seen good documentation or examples on how to write console applications that go beyond "Hello World". I'm interested in making console apps like Vim or Emacs. Well not exactly like Vim or Emacs but one that takes over the entire command prompt while it is in use and then after you exit it leaves no trace behind. I know that on Unix there is the curses library but for Windows? ...
PDCurses works on Win32.
I found List of Console Functions on msdn, PDCurses, and The Console Module.
You can certainly write that kind of application with Delphi, which has reasonable commandline support. People often overlook that Delphi can build any kind of Windows executable, not just GUI apps.
I don't know off-hand if the free 'Turbo' edition of Delphi has anything cobbled into it to PREVENT you from using it to build console apps - I would have thought it would be fine for this kind of thing.
There is a small but good tutorial on using C++ for the Windows console at www.benryves.com/tutorials/?t=winconsole&c=all going as far as coding a simple painting program.
You could also try Free Pascal. It is a free ((L)GPL) Object Pascal compiler which is compatible with the Delphi-compiler. It has an console-based IDE, which proves that you can make very good console-applications with it, and which you can use as an example.
If you want to use a graphical IDE to build your console-application, you can download the Lazarus IDE.
As a bonus your application will run on Windows (32/64 bit), Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris etc...
In Windows or DOS, I used the conio library from Borland. It's very old but fine enough for a beginner like me.
As Robsoft says Delphi would be a good start. There is Turbo Delphi (Pascal based) or Turbo C++ both free editions.
web site here.
http://www.turboexplorer.com/
Check out some of the mono libs. They have a great one to parse command line arguments but can't remember the namespace.
Miguel just posted some terminal code as well.
For ncurses-like library/framework on Windows, I'll highly suggest to get your hand dirty with PDCurses.
If you trying/using C#, there's Curses-Sharp.
This is the best tool for it I've ever seen!!
1) Create any application using VB6 IDE
2) Convert it to Console Application, using THIS!