IO Redirection Example 

Hello All,
I figured I'd post an example of how to do IO redirection with C#. This is useful for having castleOS access output from another program. For an example, I'll discuss a program I threw together with some help from examples I found via google (many are from MSDN and dotnetperls.com, as well as stackoverflow.com. These are all excellent sources to check out for example codes, questions, and how-to's) which gives me an overview of my systems.
The forum posts I used from there to get me on the right path are the following, if you'd like to try and write a similar program:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/262280/how-can-i-know-if-a-process-is-running
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1393711/get-free-disk-space
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/278071/how-to-get-the-cpu-usage-in-c

Here is sample output from running the program i wrote:
Processor utilization is at 32.88%. Available system memory is 4.8 Giggabytes. Could not scan drive for storage space. Plex Media Server is not currently running.

Now what would be neat is if we have CastleOS speak this back to me when I ask "System Status" (or whatever custom command I'd like).
We can do that! We do the following:

• Take our compiled program we wrote (SystemStatus.exe), and place it into C:\ProgramData\CastleOS\CastleOS Kinect Service\Scripts
  
  
• Write a C# script to access it, retrieve the output of it, and then have CastleOSKinectService speak this. We also place that script into C:\ProgramData\CastleOS\CastleOS Kinect Service\Scripts. In this example we call this script SystemStatus-Interface.cs
  
  
• Go into the Kinect Configurator, create the custom command we want recognized (in my case, it is "System status"), and assign the SystemStatus-Interface.cs script to it, then save.

I have attached the interface script I wrote, using the example from http://www.dotnetperls.com/redirectstandardoutput and modifying it a little bit to work with CastleOS. I'll give a brief overview of how it works and what's going on.


There are 4 'using' statements. Using is like an import, it tells the code what libraries to look into for commands. We use System, System.Diagnostics (which is for querying CPU/Memory status), System.IO (used to check disk space, and also related to Memory/CPU), and the CastleOSKinectService library, which is where our CastleOS API calls come from (in this case, the ScriptingAPI.Speak method).

The structure of a script for CastleOS is generally of the form public class [your_class_name], which then encompasses the public void Main(string[] args){} method, which is required for all scripts. This is what's referred to as the entry point of the script, it's the code that gets executed to get things rolling.

Within this Main method is the code that will run. The first block of code makes a call to the ScriptingAPI.Speak method, to have castleOS speak "Scanning Systems"; this is mainly to let us know that the script is running, as the call to our SystemStatus program takes a few seconds to execute and return.
We then use ProcessStartInfo to call upon our SystemStatus.exe. Note that we tell it to not use Shell Execution (it will run in the background instead of launching a new shell window), and we tell it we want to Redirect its output (this will capture the output into a variable we can read from once the program finishes).

We then launch the process. When we use the 'using' keyword in the code block, we basically create a temporary variable on the fly that we can use for other processing; once that block of code finishes executing, the variable is no longer used and is deallocated. In this case, we're creating a temporary variable of type Process called 'process', and assigning it the result of running our process we created just before this code (which we called 'start').

Within that using block, we then use what's called a StreamReader that we are calling 'reader' to read the result of the process we ran. We read the result by looking at process.StandardOutput, which is the captured output of SystemStatus.exe that we ran. Then, we tell the reader to read all that data into a string variable we call 'result'.

Now that we have the string we want to speak stored into that 'result' variable, we can have the CastleOS Speak method simply speak that string by passing it as an argument to the method:
ScriptingAPI.Speak(result);

This will have the CastleOSKinectService speak "Processor utilization is at 32.88%. Available system memory is 4.8 Giggabytes. Could not scan drive for storage space. Plex Media Server is not currently running." as in the example above.

This is a slightly more complex example of what can be done with the scripting system. If you have any questions feel free to ask!
edited by nikku on 12/31/2014
edited by nikku on 12/31/2014

--
-Nick B.

Yes, thank you for this Nick.

I think what we need for CastleOS is some sort of engine generator. An engine that writes the script for you after the users basically plugs in the correct information. Having something like this would make it more likely for users of CastleOS who have no knowledge of actual scripting, to get started with custom commands. I feel the scripting portion of CastleOS is its biggest crutch. Realistically, not everyone who will find CastleOS desirable will be C# programmers. There will be people who want it to work with an easy way to customize it out-the-box.

I have some (not a lot) of experience with scripting and my biggest problem is syntax. Event code, and task code, and of course how to tie them in together. Recently I have begun a learning binge on scripting. I want to learn so I can use CasteOS to its fullest potential (plus teach others on how to script). I also have other programs that open up with scripting so CastleOS is not my only reason as to why I am learning.
edited by dominique on 1/3/2015

hello I am unable to execute any program with this script..the only thing I can here is the scanning system.. .. this is the code I am using please advise.

-----------------------------
using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.IO;
using CastleOSKinectService;
public class SystemStatusInterface
{
public void Main(string[] args)
{
//
// Setup the process with the ProcessStartInfo class.
//
ScriptingAPI.Speak("Scanning systems.");
ProcessStartInfo start = new ProcessStartInfo();
start.FileName = @"C:\elpis\elpis.exe"; // Specify exe name.
start.UseShellExecute = false;
start.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
//
// Start the process.
//
using (Process process = Process.Start(start))
{
//
// Read in all the text from the process with the StreamReader.
//
using (StreamReader reader = process.StandardOutput)
{
string result = reader.ReadToEnd();
ScriptingAPI.Speak(result);
}
}
}
}

Hey,
This script opens a program in the background, then speaks its output. It's not for launching a program in the foreground, you would need slightly different code to achieve that.

--
-Nick B.

Hey Guys, again I want to suggest you bring these types of questions to the C# forums at Microsoft and StackOverflow. This really isn't a CastleOS, or even scripting, question. What you're looking for info on is really outside the scope of CastleOS. It's not that we don't want to help, but those two forums have thousands of users daily living and breathing this. They'll be able to help far more than those here...
edited by ccicchitelli on 1/3/2015

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9679375/run-an-exe-from-c-sharp-code

this is the code I am using.. also I am able to run the code in visual basic its able to open the program no problem ;

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.IO;
using CastleOSKinectService;

public class LaunchPaint
{
public void Main(string[] args)
{
ScriptingAPI.Speak("Launching Paint.");
Process.Start(@"mspaint.exe");
}
}

Hey Guys, for non GUI apps, you can use the process start method mentioned above. But you are correct that GUI apps are restricted for security reasons. It is possible, but it's much more tricky. You'll need to wrap a C++ method in C# and then call that method (CreateProcessAsUser) instead of Process.Start.

More info:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/267838/how-can-a-windows-service-execute-a-gui-application
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/418119/c-sharp-run-windows-form-application-from-service-and-in-vista
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9095909/createprocessasuser-creating-window-in-active-session

Nick
That is great! thank you for making up such a cool app!


Landon

Thanks Nick! hope this works