Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘Automation’

So a lot of people seem to be taking the latest missteps by Twitter’s management (and the accompanying admission of bad design) as an opportunity to try out some alternatives. Many of them seem to be coming over to FriendFeed (which has been better than Twitter for a long time, but nevermind that) ... so I thought I’d update and release a PowerShell 2.0 script I wrote to create imaginary friends out of your friends that stay on Twitter.

The first part of it is a WatiN script (that automates your browser) called New-ImaginaryFriend which takes three parameters: a name for the imaginary friend, a url for an avatar for the friend, and a HashTable… Of course, we sort-of cheat by using the HashTable … it’s basically a bunch of key-value pairs of remote services and user names. You can use it to add twitter ID’s like twitter="jsnover" or blogs like blog="http://HuddledMasses.org/" etc. You can even add multiple sources (eg: twitter + diigo, two blogs, etc) to a single new imaginary friend 8)...

This script is done using WatiN because the FriendFeed API doesn’t support creating imaginary friends yet, and as a result it’s slow, and requires IE (and doesn’t seem to work very well with IE8 — at least, I couldn’t get it to set the avatars using IE 8 on Windows 7, so I commented out the avatar part of the next-to-last line).

The other part of the script is a pair of functions: the first is Get-FriendFeedFriends which retrieves profile information for all your friends in a slick format that includes all their services and such … you may find other uses for this later , the second is Get-TwitterFriends … Both have an -Exclude parameter so you can pass it a list of people to ignore.

When you put these three functions together, you can just import the FriendFeed module, and start creating friends (don’t forget this version of the scripts only works with IE6 or IE7 for the purpose of avatars, as WatiN can’t seem to set the file upload value in IE8 yet).

You can download all of the required modules at once (7z), or grab the latest versions of them from PoshCode: FriendFeed, HttpRest, and WatiN … but if you do that, you’ll still need to get the binaries separately :-/

This is an update to a previous article.

Someone asked (on Twitter) about using WatiN from PowerShell, and pointed to this old post by Scott Hanselman saying he was having the same problems … so I wrote this to help them out:

WatiN requires -STA mode

Note: WatiN requires Single Threaded Apartment mode, so you need to be using PowerShell 2.0 (currently in CTP3) in order for any of this to work, and you need to pass the -STA parameter to PowerShell. Regardless, I thought I’d throw two tips out here:

Don’t use LoadFile, use LoadFrom

I’m not 100% sure when it’s appropriate to use LoadFile in PowerShell, but I can tell you that if your assembly is in a folder with a bunch of other assemblies upon which it depends … you need to use [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom( $path ) instead — because the .net loader will be able to find the dependencies.

Generate some functions to help yourself out

It’s trivial to do code-generation in PowerShell, and WatiN is not friendly to the PowerShell syntax, so you’re going to want to generate a bunch of them. To get you started, here’s a set of Find-* functions to let you find each type of element that WatiN recognizes and automates… by name, id, class, style … well, by any attribute, really:

The PowerShell Virtual User Group meeting from November was rescheduled for this first week of December, but I’m still going to be presenting there.

Please join us on Live Meeting!

Particularly if you’re interested alternate PowerShell consoles, because not only will I be presenting my (PoshConsole), but Idera will be there to show off their latest commercial console and script editor PowerShell Plus Professional.

I’ll also be presenting some information about the PowerShell Script Repository, and about my Windows (GUI) Automation Snapin for PowerShell (WASP), and Nathan Winters will be discussing managing Exchange with PowerShell, so there’s sure to be something for everyone I’d love to see more people at this event than usual, despite the repeated rescheduling, to encourage Marco Shaw (the user group organizer). After all, it’s free!

It’s tomorrow December 4th, at noon Eastern. (2008/12/04 12:00:00 PM -05:00)

Note: this is not a rescheduling of my much longer presentation about PowerShell at my local Visual Developers user group (which is coming up on December 17th), and doesn’t cover any of that content.

I keep forgetting to mention this! I’m speaking at the next PowerShell Virtual User Group this Thursday, November 13th at 12PM EST. Join us if you’re interested in any of my PowerShell CodePlex projects (PoshConsole, PoshCode, WASP). Actually, join us even if you’re not, because there’s going to be a demo of the latest version of PowerShell Plus by the folks from Idera, and Nathan Winters will be discussing managing Exchange with PowerShell.

Also, the PowerShell Community is running a survey about the possibility of a PowerShell convention, and what you’re interested in seeing at one… it’ll just take a moment

Well, I am going to put this all on CodePlex tomorrow, but I promised a few people that I’d throw it up here for them yesterday, so I figured it’s past time to post it … without further ado. [new] The Window Automation Snapin and it’s source should be downloaded from the CodePlex project where updates can be tracked.

This is basically an upgrade to the Win32.Windows snapin I released a while back, the one thing that’s missing in this release that was possible in that one is using frame-set definitions to position windows. That will make it back in eventually, but in the meantime, I present some major new additions which add up to the ability to do 90% of what you’d want to do in testing or automating your winforms app’s UI.

• Select-Window – pick windows by process name or window caption (with wildcard support)
• Select-Control – pick controls by class and/or name and/or index (with wildcard support)
• Send-Click – send mouse clicks (any button, with any modifier keys)
• Send-Keys – Windows.Forms.SendKeys lets you send keys … try this: Select-Window notepad | Send-Keys "%(ea)Testing{Enter}{F5}" (and for extra fun, try it with multiple notepad windows open).
• Set-WindowActive – yeah, just activates the window
• Set-WindowPosition – set any one of (or all of) top, left, width, height on a window … or maximize/minimize/restore
• Get-WindowPosition – get the position (kind-of redundant, actually, since the Window object has it’s position as a property)

• Remove-Window – closes the specified window

There’s no help right now, so get used to using Get-Command -PSSnapin WindowAutomation and checking out the ParameterSets … hopefully you can figure it out from that for now. Oh, one other thing, there might be a few extras hiding in these:

• [Huddled.Win32.WindowExtenders] | Get-Member -static

• [Huddled.Win32.WindowFinder] | Get-Member -static

For now, that will have to do, it’s past time for bed. You might want to play with this and the out-voice script I posted on CodePlex awhile back, it makes things extra fun.