For a while I've been trying to think of ways to achieve a simple task: I have two background tasks in my app, and I want one to notify the other about certain changes (only one-way communication required), but for the life of me I can't figure out any way that works. These are the methods I found from the internet, but all of them have issues:
I thought I could create a simple text file in the local folder of the app and put the notifications there. The listening process could somehow subscribe to that file and be notified of any changes in its content. This was achievable previously with the FileSystemWatcher class, but it was removed from Windows 8 onwards.
Then I found another API for implementing the above method, namely the QueryOptions class. But it turned that while it's available in Store apps, it's not supported on Windows Phone.
I thought about using push notifications, but they're all linked to a web service. As of yet I can't figure out any way to use them to send and receive notifications locally without a web server.
Is there any way to go about doing this? It seems like a very straightforward task but it's turning out to be impossible to achieve. Is there any other API on Windows Phone that allows a process to be notified when the contents of a file are changed? Or is there any way I can work around with push notifications and achieve this? I also read in places that named pipes and sockets are often used to achieve this kind of functionality on other platforms, is there any way to apply this here?
Short of polling the text file for changes every half a second or so (which would be highly inefficient and introduce lag which is something my app can't tolerate), I can't figure out any other way to achieve this task.
Thanks in advance.
If you want a general-purpose IPC mechanism across two or more processes in the same app, you can look into this sample which wraps Win32 IPC primitives.
There is no way to "wake up" a process (or start a background task) when a file changes. So this only works if the processes will be running at the same time (if they're not running at the same time, you can use some other sort of signaling mechanism, such as a placeholder file on disk).
There is also no way to signal across two different apps; you have to round-trip via the network for that (eg, one app pings a server that relays it to the other app).
Related
I am working on a project which includes a lot of VoIP functions. I don't have access to the source code of the previous system that was being used so I can't dissect it to find out what I need to know. I will describe how the previous system used to work and then ask my question.
First, the old system that we have been using depends on Physical Phones which receive calls over the internet. There is a Desktop App installed on our computer which somehow takes the phone call received by the phone and shows that phone number on the Desktop App. Which uses that number to look up data about the caller. But the problem is that this Desktop App is over a decade old and has not been updated since. So we want to build a new Web Based Application with .NET that will do the same. My question is:
1- How do I fetch the Caller Information From the Physical Phone and use it how I want? The phone being used is SNOM 760 but its possible that other brands or models be used in the future.
2- Let's say that a specific page is always opened on the browser. How do I transfer the caller number to the server and then show a pop up with the information about the caller in that page that's always opened in the browser in a RELIABLE way? What about when that specific page is not opened? Remember that the phone that is receiving this call is not directly in communication with the server. But that is also not a restriction. I read somewhere while researching that I could have my server take the call first and then transfer it to that physical phone. The only restriction is that we use VoIP phones/numbers.
Like I said, I have very vague information on the subject. Any help is appreciated. I've studied that I could use Twillio or other such third party services to achieve this task but I just wanted to know if I can do it myself instead of relying on someone else and hoping they don't shut down their services in the next few years.
Those are a lot of questions jammed into 1 there, I'll try to answer some.
As you already tagged it, TAPI is an option but not very easy to get into. TAPI normally get it's information centrally from the PBX, but in your particular case the SNOM system has the phones themselves connect to a central server to gather the information and distribute it there. You may be able to hook into a proprietary protocol.
Gathering calls on a central server to then distribute them to phones is usually done with an IVR (Interactive voice response). Channeling outside calls through it is easy but the problem with getting your call information from this point is usually you miss the internal calls.
Your website pop-up is not my area of expertise, maybe someone else could comment on the feasibility of that, but personally I would go with a task-tray style app if reliability is your highest priority.
I have a C# Console Application which communicates trough its Input and Output with another application. This isn't a thing that can be changed so thats the given part of the problem.
The other part is that I need a way to communicate with this Console Application. Google says WCF, REST and stuff like that but this to me seams a little bit overkill cause I only need to communicate locally to the Console Application.
I also tought of communicating trough a file with that application but than I would have to check the file in an interval for changes right? Also I'm not sure if this is performance wise the best solution? Also i would have a delay, befor the notification happens depending on the interval.
So what would be a neat way to communicate between to local applications?
To achieve this use need to implement socket communication in your application. Below link will give you an idea on how sockets works in c#
http://csharp.net-informations.com/communications/csharp-socket-programming.htm
Even though my long title spoils quite a lot of my question, I'll try to be more specific here.
I have 5 VMWare instances that all have their own tasks to do. They are hosted on one same computer. But I need one program (that I'm actually writing, duh) to get informations and to send informations such as keystrokes and mouse clicks. But from what I've red so far, communication between programs is quite hard to achieve and I haven't found any way to send keystrokes to an unfocused or reduced VMWare windows. Plus I would need to send different and specific keystrokes to each of my 5 VMWare instances.
My program will starts itself each 5 tasks in each 5 windows. The order doesn't matter as long as each instances have its own tasklist. I would need a way to keep track on each window's identity so I don't send let's say window 4's keystrokes to window 5. I would also need to be able to check periodically if each VMWare's instances is doing its job. Additionnaly my VMWare's instances are all running in a win7 environnement.
Now that the whole situation is explained, I'll sum up the question I'm currently submitting. Is there any way for my C# program to keep track of 5 VMWare's instances' identities and both send keystrokes (+ mouseclicks) and get at least screenshots of what's displayed on each of them even though they are reduced or unfocused ?
Thanks a lot.
Is there a way to get
You have an incorrect understanding of how VMWare works. VMWare isn't "running in a window". VMWare is running in a virtual machine at a very low level in your computer. What you see as a "window" is merely a "viewer" that allows you to connect to the remote machine (even though it's running on the local computer). This "viewer" is an application similar to the remote desktop client, or a VNC client. As such, there is very limited interaction between the OS and the host OS and the applications running in the guests.
This means that your host OS doesn't know anything about the individual applications running inside the guest OS, and you can't see it's window handles, or control mouse or keyboard events. In fact, the VMWare drivers "capture" the hardware and steal these events directly from the hardware, so there is no real way for your application to simulate a human interacting with the Virtual machine window.
What you COULD do, and this would be a lot of work, is create "agents" on each of the virtual machines that would have access to the applications running on them. These agents could listen for events on the network, and you could send events to them to do what you want. However, as I said.. this is likely a lot of work.
This whole thing sounds kind of cheesy to begin with, like you're trying to do something the hard way, but since you haven't told us what you're ACTUALLY trying to do.. we can't suggest any better alternatives.
A quick and dirty approach is to look into Visual Studio Test Controller and Agents. The idea is to install the agent on each one of the machines. You can then leverage the MSTest framework (wrongly called unit tests) to execute you c# code one each agent.
There are apps on Android such as Tasker and Trigger that allows the user to set up some "Triggers" and the "Responses" that should execute when each trigger triggers.
The triggers could be, for instance: Connecting to a certain Wi-Fi, Arriving a certain location (Geo-Fencing), Plugging the earphone, tapping an NFC Tag and so forth.
I wonder if there's any way to to something like this on the Windows Phone platform. I have no background in developing for WPhones (even though i have a huge C# background), so i'm not sure whether the platform itself allows this sort of "background monitoring of sensors or, if there are such sensors (such as "headphone plug").
After a quick research, seems that access to some APIs are not allowed from Background Threads, i wonder if there's anything related to security here, or just an inability of the platform.
Is there any way to achieve what i want?
On Windows Phone 8 you can perform background processing, with Background Agents.
You can use Sceduled Taksto register a class containing a method that is called periodically, even when your app is not running. They are multipurpose and offer the greatest utility for extending your app to perform background activities.
You can surely display a message to the user, or fire an alarm or something, a message would be more suited, for location aware apps. Those registered as geographic location providers are able to continue running despite there being another app running in the foreground.
For the rest of your triggers, I'm not sure. You'll have to check the Sensors.
No, you can't hook any triggers or events. The only thing you can, as Pantelis said, is to create very limited PeriodicTask that may or may not be run every roughly 30 minutes and be constrained to max 25s of running time. This is deliberate platform limitation, AFAIK done mostly because of battery usage and security reasons.
If something can't be achieved by PeriodicTask, give it up. This is the most versatile background process, others are even more limited. This is by design to prevent daemons from taking over the phone.
I was wondering if anyone knows how (or even if it is possible) to monitor and trigger an action when a computer running windows (7-8) starts reciving a file transfer from over the network onto one of its drives.
Bonus points if I can find out how big the file is that the other guy is placing on my machine and how much is done etc...
I want to know if there is any API in windows, or snippit of code, or some other API that provides any of this functionality.
I still want to be able to recive files, I just want to manage them better. I am on a network with over 90 computers and this software that I wish to write would be running on most of them.
Of course you can (after all it's what an Antivirus program does) but it's NOT easy and probably you'll see it's more comfortable to do in C than in C#. I'm sure there's a .NET porting of WinPCap anyway you can always P/Invoke.
Start reading about Network Monitor SDK on MSDN. It's not an easy task, you have to capture a specific set of frames, you may use a Network Packet Monitor to inspect the content and the type of the packets you have to capture and parse.
I'm not sure but you may take a look to QoS API (start reading this article), it should provide something you can use.