Recently I needed to show some progress indicator on some long running console application.  I recall the good old days of my college days with console based SMTP clients such as elm and pine… as I recall these clients showed progress via a simple ASCII spiner.    

I was impressed with how simple this is to do with .NET Framework 2.0.. I started off writing the usage code I wanted to enable, then built a simple class that meet those requirements.. I highly recommend this process especially for more complex designs.
Here is the client code: 

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            ConsoleSpiner spin = new ConsoleSpiner();
            Console.Write("Working....");
            while (true) 
            {
                spin.Turn();
            }
        }

And here is the class I came up with. 

    public class ConsoleSpiner
    {
        int counter;
        public ConsoleSpiner()
        {
            counter = 0;
        }
        public void Turn()
        {
            counter++;        
            switch (counter % 4)
            {
                case 0: Console.Write("/"); break;
                case 1: Console.Write("-"); break;
                case 2: Console.Write("\\"); break;
                case 3: Console.Write("-"); break;
            }
            Console.SetCursorPosition(Console.CursorLeft - 1, Console.CursorTop);
        }
    }

PS – does anyone still use elm\pine?  Are their clients that work with exchange?  Also, I was always told that pine was an acronym for “Pine Is Not Elm”, but accounting to the official site it is not.