Venkatarangan TNC

Web Browsing Testing Tool

Last few days I had a firewall issue in my desktop that made web browsing irregular. It was a peculiar problem, I was able to browse few sites like Google, Vishwak.COM but not others. I had to keep running the same diagnostic commands many times to take values to be sent to my support team. Finally I ended up writing this handy tool that copies to clipboard diagnostic informations from IPConfig, Tracert, Ping & WebGet commands. This information can be used for further investigation or email to support. I also added features to FlushDNS, Renew IP & Turn Auto Tuning (Vista and Windows Server 2008) OFF/ON.

Download the Install: EasyTools Web Browsing Test Installer.zip (192.17 KB)
Visual Studio Solution (Source code): WebBrowsingTestSource.zip (592.62 KB)

While developing the tool over two half-a-days I learnt quite a few APIs and a bit of C# coding. This included how to call a console command like IPCONFIG /ALL and capture the output to a string from a C# application, get the Internet Explorer Proxy settings, Call Network Properties applet, create an install with VS 2008 & how to paste a code snippet in WLW.

            
               1:

              private

              string DoConsoleAndCapture(string sInput)

               2: {

               3:  

               4:

              string sOutput

= "";

               5: ProcessStartInfo

pi = new ProcessStartInfo("cmd.exe", "/c

" + sInput );

               6: pi.WindowStyle

= ProcessWindowStyle.Minimized; 

               7: pi.RedirectStandardOutput

= true;

               8: pi.UseShellExecute

= false;

               9: Process

p = Process.Start(pi);

               10: p.WaitForExit();

               11:

              //p.Start();

               12: TextReader

t = p.StandardOutput;

               13: sOutput

= t.ReadToEnd();

               14: t.Close(); 

               15: p.Close();

               16:  

               17:

              return sOutput; 

               18: }

The experience of using Visual Studio 2008 was interesting as it has been few years since I coded something end to end. I wish the coding surface to become more intelligent in terms of offering help on discovering commands and APIs that the developer is looking for. When VB6 came a decade or so back the help feature that it had was revolutionary and the wealth of information MSDN provided was without par in the industry. Now with Web & Internet Search prevalent the present IDE calls for a complete rethinking and revamp - unfortunately I don't feel the tools have come there yet. What I am talking here is not about wizards, smart tags or even intellisense but about how the tool helps a developer to learn/discover necessary APIs/solve the problem at hand.