Conclusion

The reason I like console applications so much is that they reduce software to its bare essentials. Console applications only need to worry about four things: command-line arguments and the three standard data streams. The simplicity of this model looks like a severe limitation, but the pipe allows independent programs to behave symbiotically, enabling them to do more together than the sum of what they could do separately.

Implementing console applications with the .NET Framework is easy. With judicious use of some design patterns, it becomes easier still. The Process class makes accessing console applications from .NET straightforward, as long as you understand the limitations. Windows doesn't understand pipes; cmd.exe does. As such, to get pipe functionality in a Framework-based program, you need to either route all commands through cmd.exe or build your own piping capability. Both ways work, but each has trade-offs.

Console applications are currently an overlooked class of applications on Windows. This, however, is planned to change in the Longhorn timeframe. Microsoft is completely redesigning the console as a managed application for the next major release of its operating system. For more information on the Longhorn Command Shell (MSH), see the presentation from this year's PDC session ARC334, available at PDC 2003 Sessions.