Application Control Question

Hi Everyone,
I wanted to check if a project was in theory possible before I try and start coding it. I want to be able to send commands to an external application as well as read data values from its memory. I know common apps can use OLE to do this, but this is a very specialized app and if it has any OLE support there is no documentation for it (I doubt it supports it at all). Is there a way to send basic commands (Keystrokes) to an application and is there a way to read from that applications memory? If so what keywords should I be searching to find some code examples.

Thanks!

It really depends on specifics of the program you want to try to manipulate.

If it is a standard Win32 application, then you could use a program like Spy++ to dig into the forms and get names of controls so you could send Win32 API messages to get values from textboxes and labels and things like that. You can also use this to invoke commands upon the other software. Another method of sending commands is SendKeys, but usually SendKeys never results in a 100% ideal scenario.

There was just an article in MSDN magazine about UI test automation, which may be of some interest for you to read. It isn't in VB (C#), but the concepts are all the same and easily applied to VB.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/08/02/TestRun/