I spent a few hours today researching how to get Chrome native messaging working with a C# native host. Conceptually it was quite simple, but there were a few snags that I resolved with help (in part) from these other questions:
Native Messaging Chrome
Native messaging from chrome extension to native host written in C#
Very Slow to pass "large" amount of data from Chrome Extension to Host (written in C#)
My solution is posted below.
C programming language is a machine-independent programming language that is mainly used to create many types of applications and operating systems such as Windows, and other complicated programs such as the Oracle database, Git, Python interpreter, and games and is considered a programming foundation in the process of ...
In the real sense it has no meaning or full form. It was developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at AT&T bell Lab. First, they used to call it as B language then later they made some improvement into it and renamed it as C and its superscript as C++ which was invented by Dr. Stroustroupe.
C is a general-purpose language that most programmers learn before moving on to more complex languages. From Unix and Windows to Tic Tac Toe and Photoshop, several of the most commonly used applications today have been built on C. It is easy to learn because: A simple syntax with only 32 keywords.
We write C for Carbon Because in some element the symbol of the element is taken form its first words and Co for Cobalt beacause in some elements the symbol of the element is taken from its first second letters, so that the we don't get confuse.
Assuming the manifest is set up properly, here is a complete example for talking to a C# host using the "port" method:
using System;
using System.IO;
using Newtonsoft.Json;
using Newtonsoft.Json.Linq;
namespace NativeMessagingHost
{
class Program
{
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
JObject data;
while ((data = Read()) != null)
{
var processed = ProcessMessage(data);
Write(processed);
if (processed == "exit")
{
return;
}
}
}
public static string ProcessMessage(JObject data)
{
var message = data["text"].Value<string>();
switch (message)
{
case "test":
return "testing!";
case "exit":
return "exit";
default:
return "echo: " + message;
}
}
public static JObject Read()
{
var stdin = Console.OpenStandardInput();
var length = 0;
var lengthBytes = new byte[4];
stdin.Read(lengthBytes, 0, 4);
length = BitConverter.ToInt32(lengthBytes, 0);
var buffer = new char[length];
using (var reader = new StreamReader(stdin))
{
while (reader.Peek() >= 0)
{
reader.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
}
}
return (JObject)JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<JObject>(new string(buffer));
}
public static void Write(JToken data)
{
var json = new JObject();
json["data"] = data;
var bytes = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(json.ToString(Formatting.None));
var stdout = Console.OpenStandardOutput();
stdout.WriteByte((byte)((bytes.Length >> 0) & 0xFF));
stdout.WriteByte((byte)((bytes.Length >> 8) & 0xFF));
stdout.WriteByte((byte)((bytes.Length >> 16) & 0xFF));
stdout.WriteByte((byte)((bytes.Length >> 24) & 0xFF));
stdout.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
stdout.Flush();
}
}
}
If you don't need to actively communicate with the host, using runtime.sendNativeMessage
will work fine. To prevent the host from hanging, simply remove the while
loop and do Read/Write once.
To test this, I used the example project provided by Google here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/chrome/common/extensions/docs/examples/api/nativeMessaging
Note: I'm using Json.NET to simplify the json serialization/de-serialization process.
I hope this is helpful to somebody!
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