Powershell and DDE?

[thinknew]

How do you use DDE in powershell? I'm comfortable with powershell and would
like to keep it in the family...but if unconventional, what is the easiest or
traditional method? The background is that I have an oldschool 16-bit
application that I need to automate. I have visibility of the applications
DDE documentation and as a first step, am trying to determine how I will
establish this DDE connection.

Thoughts?

[Bob Landau]

I suggest a different route

1) Search for a DDE client that can be automated using COM automation

2) Dig up an old version of Visual Basic or if you're comfortable use C or
MFC.

I you are really insistent PInvoke does give you access to the Win32 api's
such as SendMessage (this is how DDE communicates). That along with the
documentation you already have in theory will allow you to communicate using
DDE.

One last note here any .NET language would have the same diffculties

[Alex K. Angelopoulos dot dot again at]

I've never seen anyone even discuss using DDE with PowerShell before, so
you'll be inventing the "traditional" method. Besides what Bob mentioned,
here are a couple of avenues to explore.

(1) .NET-based DDE
The standard DDE APIs are embedded in Windows (with the exception of the
NetDDE stuff that started going away with Vista), so there are some wrappers
out there. You might try using NDDE since it's a .NET component that can be
loaded and used as an object:
http://ndde.codeplex.com/

(2) commandline DDE
There are supposedly multiple commandline DDE utilities out there, but I
haven't seen much about them; you'll need to hunt to find them. Try DDE_run
and CMCDDE. Unfortunately CMCDDE appears to be missing in action from its
original website.

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