I've seen a few topics on the discussion boards about people wanting console-less .exe's to run with Fantom. So this is directed at the newbies like myself who want a semi solution.

After a couple of weeks of developing, I grew tired of having consoles piling up from opening multiple Flux windows, so I got sidetracked into finding a way to get rid of that pesky console and ran into this snippet of C# code: http://www.jonasjohn.de/snippets/csharp/run-console-app-without-dos-box.htm

I downloaded visual C# 2010 Express (which is free), started a new project as ConsoleApplication, changed the project properties Output type to Windows Application, modified the code to this:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace fanw
{
  class Program
  {
      static void Main(string[] args)
      {

          // Application path and command line arguments
          string ApplicationPath = "C:/FAN_HOME/bin/flux.exe"; //this is important
          string ApplicationArguments = ""; //this is important

          // Create a new process object
          Process ProcessObj = new Process();

          // StartInfo contains the startup information of
          // the new process
          ProcessObj.StartInfo.FileName = ApplicationPath;
          ProcessObj.StartInfo.Arguments = ApplicationArguments;

          // These two optional flags ensure that no DOS window
          // appears
          ProcessObj.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
          ProcessObj.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;

          // If this option is set the DOS window appears again :-/
          // ProcessObj.StartInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;

          // This ensures that you get the output from the DOS application
          ProcessObj.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;

          // Start the process
          ProcessObj.Start();

          // Wait that the process exits
          ProcessObj.WaitForExit();

          // Now read the output of the DOS application
          string Result = ProcessObj.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd();
      }
  }
}

built the project, found where the .exe file was being generated, sent it to my desktop and voila I have console-less flux! :)

This got me thinking, could I use this same code to generate an executable that would run my fantom projects without the window?? Indeed!

By changing these two fields,

string ApplicationPath = "C:/FAN_HOME/bin/fan.exe"; //directory to your fan compiler
string ApplicationArguments = "hello"; //name of your pod/pods go here 

I managed to run my own fantom applications without a console window!

I don't think this is a final solution to this issue (which I think is a Windows OS problem more then a fantom problem) but I think its a step in the right direction. If anyone out there with some C# experience could take this and make a standalone Fantome .exe generator or a similar solution for the .net platform, that would be awesome. (This is my first time touching C# ever)

Hope this helps!

Looks cool yliu!

At some point, I will fix the C launcher code to do this too (without having .NET dependency). I also am planning Windows code for running Fantom programs as services. It is amazing how insanely difficult it is to the simplest things like running a program in Windows.