Building A Simple Password Generator In C# & .NET - Part 2 - Novice UI With Spectre.Console

This is Part 2 in a series in which we will build a simple password generator.

In our last post, Building A Simple Password Generator In C# & .NET - Part 1, we wrote the logic for a simple password generator.

In this post, we will build a simple command-line interface for the logic.

For this, we will use the Spectre.Console package.

dotnet add package Spectre.Console
dotnet add package Spectre.Console.Cli

We will first start with a simple flow where we assume the user is a novice.

We will ask for all the requirements from the user.

using Spectre.Console;

var passwordLength = AnsiConsole.Prompt(
    new TextPrompt<int>("How long should the password be?"));
var numbers = AnsiConsole.Prompt(
    new TextPrompt<int>("How many numbers should the password contain?"));
var symbols = AnsiConsole.Prompt(
    new TextPrompt<int>("How many symbols should the password contain?"));

AnsiConsole.WriteLine($"Generating password of length {passwordLength} with {numbers} numbers and {symbols}");

If we run this code, the user gets the following experience:

At this point, we can wire in the password generation:

AnsiConsole.WriteLine($"Generating password of length {passwordLength} with {numbers} numbers and {symbols}...");

var password = PasswordGenerator.GeneratePassword(numbers, symbols, passwordLength);

AnsiConsole.MarkupLineInterpolated($"The generated password is [bold red]{password}[/]");

Running the code should yield something like the following:

Finally, we write some code to handle edge cases:

try
{
    var password = PasswordGenerator.GeneratePassword(numbers, symbols, passwordLength);

    AnsiConsole.MarkupLineInterpolated($"The generated password is [bold red]{password}[/]");
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    AnsiConsole.MarkupLineInterpolated($"[bold red]Error generating password: {ex.Message}[/]");
}

In our next post, we will look at how to support experienced users on the command line.

The code is in my GitHub.

Happy hacking!