Ruby OLE

The other day someone came over to my desk and asked me how they could programatically invoke the "Find Computer" function of the Windows shell. Normally you just press CTRL-WINDOWS-F and up pops an Explorer window ready for searching. I didn't have a quick answer for him... so I immediately took up the challenge to figure it out.

After a couple dead ends I started looking at Windows Script Host (WSH). It allows you to write VB or JavaScript to access the ActiveX API of a Windows application. After a bit of googling I found the "Shell.Application" documentation on MSDN. After futzing around with Javascript for a few minutes I started thinking that I should be able to do the same things with Ruby. So with a little more searching I discovered that by adding "require 'win32ole'" at the top of my ruby script I could instantiate an instance of "Shell.Application".

The only problem left was finding the right API call. A three line Ruby script like this gave me a list of methods:

require 'win32ole'
wsh = WIN32OLE.new('Shell.Application')
wsh.ole_methods.collect{|m| m.to_s}.sort.each{|m| puts m}

A quick change and my final script looked like:

require 'win32ole'
wsh = WIN32OLE.new('Shell.Application')
wsh.FindComputer()

or in JavaScript:

wsh = WScript.CreateObject("Shell.Application");
wsh.FindComputer();

If you want to take this scripting stuff to the next level I suggest you go check out David Mullet's "Ruby on Windows" blog. He describes some of the same things I just demonstrated above and goes into a lot greater depth about how to use Ruby to script think like Word and Excel.

And in case you're wondering why I had to use Ruby to get a list of methods instead of just looking it up in MSDN, well just try looking at the MSDN page I referenced above with Firefox instead of IE.... That's right... the site navigation only works correctly in Internet Explorer.