Creating reusable components from a button click

Question

Okay I'm not well versed in windows forms using C# yet however from my ASP.Net experience I'm muddling my way through it. In short what I'm trying to do is create a Converter for those people that use notepad as an editor. The Long to create components in ASP.Net you need to enter in a whole bunch of information into a command prompt to convert a .cs .vb or .js file to a .exe .dll etc. Thus creating reusable components. In Visual Studios this is easy but for the people that don't own VS I would like to make things easier for them. So what I did was design an interface that lets them set their in directory out directory select the type of file they would like to convert it to and the language they would like to use. Now I'm stuck! I can't figure out how to get all the information that I collected in variables to execute at the command prompt and create a new file. Any help would be great as I don't know where to start.

tsuman_in · Answer

Have you every heard of NANT? It's a cool build tool that works from the command line and does exactly what you're talking about--it's open source so it can give you a good starting point. There's also an open source download of a build tool from MS designed specifically for taking files out of sourcesafe and compiling. Good luck we had to build a tool like that for my office. It's a lot of configuration.

jnowicki · Answer

I think so. I have to do a little research in the MSDN Library so that I understand exactly what you are talking about. You meantioned a console application however I did it as a Win32 application(Windows Form). The whole reason I am doing this is so you don't have to type. I'll put my stuff up online on my site so you can look at it and tell me if I'm on the right track. Thanks for the help its much appreciated. http://www.1stopcomputersolutions.com/dllconverter.rar

jcity444 · Answer

Seems like you just want to create a console application and use the System.IO namespace to read and write your files. The console application will run at the command prompt. You can use the arguments in the static Main to allow the user to enter the file extensions/names they want to convert to and from. To create a new file: using System.IO; ... FileStream fs = null; fs = new FileStream(output.cs FileMode.Create FileAccess.Write); StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(fs); // write my converted code here sw.Close(); fs.Close(); Is this what your trying to do? -Mike G.