Usually, the manuals of the applications come aplenty with sample code in Visual Basic. Converting the code from Visual Basic to Perl is a mostly mechanic task and hence I never found the need to read tutorials for automating Windows stuff beyond reading the manuals or the help files that come with the target applications.

If you are lucky and your target application includes a macro recorder that records into a Visual Basic program, you can even skip the "read the manual" part of finding out what functions to call and simply record the actions you want and then translate the generated Visual Basic code to Perl. Thanks to OLE, you can remotely use the exposed APIs of the applications, and at least Microsoft is very good at exposing good APIs for Microsoft Office. With the exception of Outlook.

If you're unlucky and your target application does not expose an OLE API, then you will have to use Win32::GuiTest to send (preferrably) keystrokes, window messages or mouse clicks (fragile) to the target application to automate it.

If you're looking into accessing the Windows API, there is only one resource I can recommend, the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), which has the (current) Windows API online.

In reply to Re: Favorite Windows Automation Book/Tutorial by Corion
in thread Favorite Windows Automation Book/Tutorial by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.