.net

Microsoft .NET Framework doesn’t provide a method that you can simply call for opening or closing the CD or DVD tray of the computer drives. However, that doesn’t mean this can’t be easily accomplished by using the mciSendString from the Windows API. The project attached to this tutorial is created in Visual Studio 2005, but the code works in Visual Studio 2003 aswell.

Start by creating a C# Windows application project. And drag two buttons to the form, btnOpen and btnClose, which will open and close the CD / DVD tray when clicked. Now switch to code view, and add the following using directive, since we’ll More >

1. using System;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using System.ComponentModel;
4. using System.Data;
5. using System.Drawing;
6. using System.Text;
7. using System.Windows.Forms;
8. // Remember to add a reference to the System.Management assembly
9. using System.Management;
11. namespace ShutDown
12. {
13. public partial class Form1 : Form
14. {
15. public Form1()
16. {
17. InitializeComponent();
18. }
20. private void btnShutDown_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
21. {
22. ManagementBaseObject mboShutdown = null;
23. ManagementClass mcWin32 = new ManagementClass(“Win32_OperatingSystem”);
24. mcWin32.Get();
25. // You can’t shutdown without security privileges
26. mcWin32.Scope.Options.EnablePrivileges = true;
27. ManagementBaseObject mboShutdownParams = mcWin32.GetMethodParameters(“Win32Shutdown”);
28. // Flag 1 means we want to shut down the system
29. mboShutdownParams["Flags"] = “1″;
30. mboShutdownParams["Reserved"] = “0″;
31. foreach (ManagementObject manObj in mcWin32.GetInstances())
32. {
33. mboShutdown = manObj.InvokeMethod(“Win32Shutdown”, mboShutdownParams, null);
34. }
35. }
36. }
37. }

In this tutorial we’re going to build a very interesting .NET application, and based on the code here you will hopefully be able to build various applications or to help you with extending your current work.

Before digging into the code, you should know that the code you see in this tutorial and in the attached project resumes to only the strict functionality of exchanging files between two computers using the .NET Framework. If you want to integrate this into a real-life application, you will need to put more effort into this code since currently it lacks crash prevention and recovery, testing More >

In the previous tutorial entitled Zipping files using GZipStream we reviewed how to compress files using the System.IO.Compression namespace, and we also learned that the GZipStream class of this namespace has some limitations. If you haven’t read that tutorial, I suggest that you read it, and among other things you will learn that we can’t compress multiple files into a single archive and/or give them each a file name like you are used to when using popular tools such as WinRAR or WinZIP. Details on why this isn’t possible and what workaround is available are in that tutorial.

This means we More >

This is a continuation of the tutorial entitled “Creating a download manager in C#” in which we created a Windows application that was capable of downloading files via the http:// protocol and showing the progress of retrieving the bytes from the server to the local computer. In this tutorial we’ll see how we can put additional functionality into this application, by adding code that allows the user to pause and resume a download.

If you didn’t read the previous tutorial, you should, otherwise you will not understand much of this one since we’ll be developing on top of the code explained More >