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Scripting Windows Apps

Scripting Windows Apps — cover art: a wise old wildebeest (the GNU mascot) in a deep-oxblood waistcoat sits on a workbench stool holding a small wooden marionette cross, fine pale strings crossing the bench to a small brass-and-mahogany clockwork appliance with a single lit leaded-glass window.

2004 · Drunken Blog Rants · Rant

“We all (hopefully) know how useful scripting can be on our Linux boxes. But I'm not sure many Amazon folks have had the Win32-scripting side of things really 'sink in' yet. Once I start thinking this way, I'll spot all sorts of automation tasks that I'd never thought to automate before.”
— From Scripting Windows Apps, September 2004
Read the essay

© 2004 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Drunken Blog Rants.

Author’s note

A short and lighthearted essay about using Ruby to control Windows desktop applications. This was new territory back in 2004.

Now that AI has landed, app scriptability becomes a life-or-death differentiator. If an app can't be controlled and extended, it'll just get rewritten.

AI Notes

Steve, in late 2004, had a stack of Word documents to convert to a particular XML format and reached for Ruby instead of XSLT. The job was small enough that Ruby's built-in win32ole support became the centrepiece, and the post opens with the small surprise of how clean Win32 scripting can be from Ruby. The sharper example follows: scraping Amazon's internal mailing-list pages by instantiating an invisible Internet Explorer, navigating past Isaac auth, and pulling rendered HTML out the back. Two short working scripts — email-diff and whosin — give the reader the five-line incantation for "drive IE programmatically and parse the result." The tone is exactly that of a developer who has discovered something he expects to use a hundred more times: pleased, slightly conspiratorial, already imagining the follow-ons (automating a fresh Windows install, scripting Outlook to pre-accept meetings).

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