Software Gadgets

I’m posting about this tiny utility more so that I can find it again than out of any expectation that hundreds of thousands of readers are going to run out and get a copy, so if this utility seems useless to you — I will not feel bad. I expect only one out of a hundred power users would have any use for it.

I’m beta-testing the new version 2 of Find and Run Robot (FARR), a fantastic popup “command line” for Windows (written by mouser over at Donation Coder). One of the great features of FARR is its alias groups that allow you to create groups of commands that you can search through just like they were shortcuts or files and execute them with a keypress or mouse click. I have a number of strange (and old) programs that can be controlled via DDE Execute commands (DDE a pre-COM version of interprocess communication which was first available on Windows 3.x). If I had a simple command line program that could send a DDE Execute message to a selected program, I would be able to create aliases which would allow me to control these running programs by typing aliases in FARR.

Finding a command line program to send DDE Execute commands to any program has taken me over a week. Normally, I would have given up, but I remembered using such a program 8 to 10 years ago. I finally found a program called CMCDDE which only seems to be available on a French site, although the program’s builtin help is in English. Using the program is simple:

CMCDDE “programname” “DDEtopicname”  “command to be executed”

sends “command to be executed” to  the DDEtopicname topic of programname via the Windows’ DDE interprocess communication protocol. Exactly what I need. If all this is gibberish to you, that just means you don’t need this program.

According to the web site, the program works in Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. It worked fine on my copy of XT.

Operating System: Windows
Price: Free
Web Site: http://www.istri.fr/spip.php?article340

Tags: windows, freeware, command line DDE