Windows XP - hook into touchscreen event? - windows-xp

I'm working on a touchscreen product that's deployed on Windows XP. I would like to be able to trap the event of the user pressing and holding down a certain area of the touchscreen for a certain period of time. Is there a low level way I can hook into Windows to capture an event like this?
TY,
Fred

I would be extremely surprised if this was available. You can get some of the messages related to IE (windows resize etc and windows move in early versions) but I think that's it.
Thinking about it letting Webpages get very jiggy with the host OS would be asking for trouble.
If you have full control of the deployment environment (sounds like they might be workstations or terminal that you deploy?) your best bet might be to resort to somelike like ActiveX controls downloaded to the client to hook your messages for you and feed back from there in some way.

Consider using SetWindowsHookEx Function and WH_MOUSE_LL(value 13) in place of idHook parameter to hook mouse events
More info at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms644990%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318804

Related

Generally what would cause Unity Editor freezes and not responding?

I have encountered a critical issue that Unity Editor freezes. I've spent many hours debugging step by step of my codes but still can't find where the problem is. So I think maybe I should try thinking from another angle, generally speaking what reasons would cause Unity Editor freezes and not responding?
I can't find a general case discussion about this topic.
From my experience, infinite loop is one reason for sure. Deadlock is critical issue, but not sure if it causes Unity Editor freezes. Unity Editor bug that I encountered only makes the whole editor crashes, instead of freezing. Any other experiences are welcomed. Thank you!
In such case, what kind of tools or methods could I use to debug it? Right now since the editor freezes I can't use "print" to find out what happens after it freezes. So I use Visual studio to debug the Editor thread, in this way I can see all the prints that I wrote. It appears the game is still running, only the editor not responding. And I can use VS click "attach to Unity and play" and put some debugging points, then debug step by step.
The first thing that I would check out is for an infinite loop. At the hang/freeze moment, you can attatch the debugger of your choice and pause the execution. In the case that it is an infinite loop that it is executing, at the exec time pause you might find the execution in a forever running while (true) {...}
Other thing that I would check is the plugins in use. Several Unity plugins like Parse, FMOD, UMP (Universal Media Player), ZFBrowser, or Embedded Browser are using native threads. It’s an issue when a plugin ends up attaching a native thread to the runtime, which then does blocking calls to the OS. This means Unity can't interrupt that thread for the debugger (or domain reload) and hang. Source
To check that you can check the active threads in the visual studio command window af the freeze is reproduced:
View->OtherWindows->CommandWindow and type in this command:
Debug.ListCallStack /AllThreads /ShowExternalCode
In the stack you can check if some thread is there with no need, or if its related with the plugins mentioned above.
Also an interesting point is to check in the windows task manager (in the case that you are using windows) if the CPU usage is to 0%. It can lead you to the type of hang that is taking place.
Good luck.
Edit: I forgot to mention, you need to check also the unity logfiles
I notice this all the time, and its super frustrating.
Unfortunately, this could be any number of issues. I notice this issue most often when working in projects that are made for the Universal Windows Platform.
Try using the Task manager to monitor specific processes / threads running.
Some follow up questions:
What platform is your project currently targeting?
What version of Unity are you running? Have you tried other versions?
What are your computers specs? Is the OS up to date? Graphics Drivers?
Does it happen (or happen more often) when an external code editor is open? Perhaps try going to Preferences>External Editor > Regenerate Project files.
Are you using Unity Collab by chance? I've had issues where collab is stuck trying to communicate with Unity Servers / looking for changes. Try logging out of your Unity account through the editor, and log back in.
Have you tried looking for a Unity editor crash dump, or error log files? I think they can be found here C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\Unity by default. Those files may give you more specific data concerning your problem.
Unity's new versions are getting more slower and slower. From my experience 2019 versions are the best and more stable.
I solved my issue. It's fundamentally an infinite loop.
It's not a simple case such as "while(true)". I'll try to explain.
My game was a PvP game, and I'm making a local AI. Usually my design pattern works fine, however I just turned off the simulation of "AI thinking time", and since the AI codes and server codes all run in local mode, the transmitting of data between server and client are replaced by local method call(meaning instantly executed before everything else).
There is a loophole in my server code. I use "Update" and a flag on server to change a specific game state, however in this particular case, it got into an infinite loop because the local method call is executed before the "Update". And because my AI now doesn't need real time to "think", it "acts" and transmits the event data to server right away. And since the transmitting doesn't need time any more, it calls the server method instantly, hence forming the infinite loop.

VB6 form cuts off toolbar at run-time on Windows 7/8/10 but not XP

I have a Visual Basic 6.0 application which has several forms hosting toolbars. One of these forms, as depicted in the image, displays with its toolbar cut off or truncated on the right by the form's right hand edge. There should be a 'Paste' button also displayed.
At design time the form displays correctly. At run time it also displays correctly on Windows XP, but not on 7/8/10. I am using a VMWare VM running XP Professional 32-bit for development. Notable properties include: form is re-sizeable; toolbar does not wrap. I have tried setting the form width manually in the 'Load' event with no effect. Aside from this issue I've had no problems running this Visual Basic 6.0 application on any version of windows. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Why you use Windows XP as environment of development?
You should use always the latest version of Windows (Windows 10) to avoid this problems.
You should never use Windows XP as a development environment because it is too different from Windows versions (Vista and later). It would make sense only if you use the Classic theme in all versions of Windows, otherwise you will find many differences because system object measurements vary from theme to theme. Only the Classic theme is constants on all Windows versions.
My solution example: on my applications I use save/load routines to manage the form size and position (I use a simply user INI file). So, when the user change them will be saved on INI file, the next session the same size e position will be loaded again.
However, this solve the problem with resizable form, for fixed forms don't.
Finally, i suggest you to create a Windows 10 (VMWare or VirtualBox), install all VB6 environment, and use this to develop.
But, of course, if your host system is already Windowx 10, then use this directly.

Assign command to the central soft button within javaMe

I have the mobile javaMe application that has been working on Nokia Phones. However, now I'm porting it to Samsung 5611, and I've faced with such a problem: no command is assigned on the central soft button, all of them are contained in the right-button menu. When the same midlet was launched on Nokia 3110c, one command was placed on central button, other ones (if >=2) were grouped into the options menu.
I tried Item.setDefaultCommand (no effect) and Display.getInstance().setThirdSoftButton(true) (such method not supported in SDK 3.4). Also I tried to change the type of one command to Ok or Screen, and change the priority, everything is without success.
Thanks in advance. Any idea will be helpful.
Sadly there's no way for the developer to decide exactly on which softbuttons the commands belong. It is the individual device that decides. Some devices has two softbuttons, and some has three.
You can fiddle a bit with priorities, but you still can't force commands to specific softbuttons.
That's high-level GUI (Form) for you.
If you want to have control of such things, you need to go with low-level GUI (Canvas / GameCanvas). Nowadays there are several APIs you can use to create Form-like low-level GUI. Check out LWUIT for example, which I imagine makes it easy for you to port your high-level code into low-level.
But even when using low-level coding, you have to be aware of different devices having different keycodes for the softbuttons.

Using NPAPI to detect browser minimize

Is there a way to use NPAPI to determine whether the browser is minimized.
Not directly. Depending on which platform you want (you should really specify things like that) there might be a way.
For example, on windows you might be able to get the browser HWND (NPN_GetValue with NPNVnetscapeWindow) and then check the state of that window with windows API calls.
On mac you're going to have a harder time of it; you could possibly intuit from the clipping information passed into NPP_SetWindow, but that doesn't tell you if the browser is minimized or if the plugin (or even the tab) is just not visible. Again, you'd need to try to figure out a way to use system calls to find your way back to the real window, but on Mac that's going to be very non-trivial.
Linux I'm not sure; you get a GtkSocket if you use XEmbed (only thing Chromium supports) and I haven't a clue if you can use that to get back to where you'd need to be to check minimized state.
So the short answer is no; NPAPI doesn't provide anything like that. You'd just have to try to find something that it does provide that gives you enough info to hack it.
Since I was using Core animation layer. I put in a timer which checks how often the candraw call back is called. If the time difference between the two callbacks are greater than a second I assume that either my plug-in is minimized or hidden.

Embedded MSHTML: mouse wheel ignored

In my VC++ application I have an embedded browser (MSHTML). It works fine and handles the mouse properly (for instance, clicks and selects are processed OK). However, mouse wheel rotations over the embedded browser do not have any effect. This is my problem.
I am not very familiar with the internals of MSHTML embedding, and OLE in general. This is an wxWidgets application (wxWidgets is a C++ GUI library), and I am making use of its IEHTMLWin component (which hosts an MSHTML control and wraps it in the wxWindow interface). However, I do have the source and am willing to do some debugging.
Forgetting wxWidgets and speaking purely about OLE and MSHTML, what's the right place to start looking for the problem cause? I tried naive googling for variants of "mshtml mouse events" or "mshtml wheel", but didn't give any good pointers.
Should you want to take a look at the code of IEHTMLWin, it can be browsed here. The iehtmlwin.c file (1,5 k lines) has all the OLE-related code and implements all interfaces needed to host a web browser control. It's worth noting that mouse events don't proceed to the containing wxWindow at all (OnMouse is never called).
{UPD} mshtml version: 6.00.2900.3314. Other applications that host this control (including IE) support the wheel. {/UPD}
jdigital hint (regarding winspector) was very helpful. After some message sniffing, I realize that the problem is focus-related. A click on the browser control somehow does not set focus on the browser control (unlike, say, RichEdit), and WM_MOUSEWHEEL is not sent there. So the new problem is setting the focus.
Try Winspector (http://www.windows-spy.com/) which will allow you to see the windows messages. Make sure that the scroll wheel events are getting passed through.