I put my EXE files (usually to edit/convert ASCII files) in an own directory. The directory path is also put in the PATH variable of the system, so I can start the programs from anywhere. So here my question:
Is there a way (in VB.net) to find from where I started my program?
I need to know that to put that path as initial directory for the openFile-Dialogues.
Thanks for your help,
Jan
There are a few ways to do this. Here are two:
System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory()
Or:
Application.StartupPath
Both will return strings of the path where your app was started.
Read more:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.appdomain.basedirectory(v=vs.110).aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.application.startuppath(v=vs.110).aspx
EDIT:
There is also this way, which checks the path based on the current executing/executed assembly:
System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().CodeBase)
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa457089.aspx
But personally I'd recommend the above two.
Ok, I found a quite simple answer. I already tried it once, but apparently under different circumstances. The right function is just CurDir(). Thanks for your efforts.
Related
Is there a way to do so ? I searched Google but couldn't find any answer, so I guess the answer would be no. Is there anything close ? If not, would it be easy to extend red-lang to do so ?
From http://www.rebol.com/docs/setup.html
Startup Scripts
When REBOL starts it will automatically run the rebol.r and user.r files, if they exist.
The system looks for these files first in the current directory (or the directory of the script being run), then in the directory that contains the REBOL executable program.
Note that REBOL/Core runs fine without the rebol.r and user.r files. They simply provide an easy way to include additional code and data on startup, such as your network preferences.
If you compile your own Red interpreter you can add an autoloading file, maybe in console.red after system/console/init "Red Console" and before system/console/launch Best advice is to ask on the https://gitter.im/red/help site to ask for help. I guess this was already discussed.
I know i can use 7z or winrar but i want to learn this for myself.
How would i implement a self extracting archive? I can use C# or C++ but let me run down the problem.
When i open the exe i need some kind of GUI asking where to extract the files. Once the user says ok I should obviously extract them. I implemented a simple example in C# winforms already BUT my problem is HOW do i get the filenames and binary of the files into an exe?
One upon a time i ask Is it safe to add extra data to end of exe? and the answer suggested if i just add data to the end of the exe it may be picked up by a virus scanner. Now its pretty easy to write the length of the archive as the last 4bytes and just append the data to my generic exe and i do believe my process can read my own exe so this could work. But it feels hacky and i rather not have people accuse me of writing virus just because i am using this technique. Whats the proper way to implement this?
Note: I checked the self-extracting tag and many of the question is how to manipulate self extracting and not how to implement. Except this one which is asking something else Self-extracting self-checking executable
-edit- I made two self extracting with 7z and compared them. It looks like... well it IS the 7z.sfx file but with a regular 7z archive appended. So... there is nothing wrong with doing this? Is there a better way? I'm targeting windows and can use the C# compiler to help but i don't know how much extra work or how difficult it may be programmatically and maybe adding data to end of exe isnt bad?
It is possible. I used the following technique once, when we needed to distribute updates for the application, but the computers were configured so that the end user had no permissions to change application files. The update was supposed to log on to administrator account and update required files (so we came across identical problem: how to distribute many files as a single executable).
The solution were file resources in C#. All you need to do is:
Create a resource file in your C# project (file ending with .resx).
Add new resource of type "file". You can easily add existing files as byte[] resources.
In program you can simply extract resource as file:
System.IO.FileStream file = new System.IO.FileStream("C:\\PathToFile",
System.IO.FileMode.OpenOrCreate);
System.IO.BinaryWriter writer = new System.IO.BinaryWriter(file);
writer.Write(UpdateApplication.Data.DataValue, 0, UpdateApplication.Data.DataValue.Length);
(Here UpdateApplication.Data denotes binary resource).
Our solution lacked compression, but I believe this is easily achieved with libraries such as C#ZipLib.
I hope this solution is virus-scanner-safe, as this method creates complete, valid executable file.
I'm working on msbuild to get version info from assembly file. But i got a problem that the value $(MaxAssemblyVersion) is always empty. The only difference here is that i got a .Net solution including several projects. So i have a GlobalAssemblyInfo.cs at the root folder and Assemblyinfo.cs inside every included project. Anyone has any suggestion for my situation? Is there any way to work with GlobalAssemblyinfo.cs?
Look forward to your reply!
Every comment will be very helpful and appropriated.
Many thanks,
Depending on what point during the build you need the assembly version, you could extract it from your outputs using the GetAssemblyIdentity Task.
There are many programs out there that will allow you to pack a few files together and generate an executable that has the necessary code to extract them. Somehow, those files are residing inside the executable. I am interested in doing the same thing; how is this done?
FYI, I'm interested primarily in Windows .exe files, if it makes a difference.
Look at this: Article
You could probably save a file/files in a resource, compile it into the exe then use some code in the exe to extract it out to a file.
ie:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/winsdk/binaryresources.aspx
Self extracting .exe files are usually archive files (zip, rar, tar, etc) concatenated together with a small program that does the extraction then executes the program that was extracted from the archive.
A really sophisticated one could extract the archive into memory and then jump to the extracted code and run it, but back in the old days, that sort of thing was easier to do.
If you wanted to write your own in Windows, you would create a small console application that did the extraction, and you would include the 'real' program in the console programs' resources.
There are also products like pkzip and winzip which do it for you. If your time is worth anything, those would be more efficient.
UPX is a well known packer for Windows .EXE which can be found here on WikiPedia. And here is the main site on sourceforge for UPX.
Hope this helps,
Best regards,
Tom.
I'm using a decompiler to look at a DLL I built a while ago because I don't have the original source anymore. I want to see what a specfic value for a resource string is, but I can't seem to find them. I embedded the resource file, so I figured I could just decompile the DLL and see the string, but it isn't anywhere to be found. Any place I should be checking or is this not possible?
Ended up using Reflector and saw what I needed.
Would a tool like XN Resource Editor work for you?