I'm attempting to put together a telnet client for wp7 mango, so I can play some muds on my dev phone. I am having difficulty finding a decent open source terminal emulation library that will work for Silverlight (mango is roughly equivalent to the sl 4 stack). I see amuse, but that was written for wpf and sl doesn't seem to have that flow layout control it uses to display the telnet console. Any suggestions? I am already able to connect to a telnet server and get a two way stream, but of course i get mostly garbage without term emulation.
Edit: I ended up implementing my own ascii escape code (a sub-set of VT100 essentially, with unsupported options parsed but ignored) and telnet server command parsing engine (it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be), and also my own rendering code using the RichTextBox control, which was necessary due to limitations of silverlight on the phone which aren't there in either silverlight for the browser or WPF in windows.
You could try to contact Stefan Olson, who implemented a FlowDocument Viewer for Silverlight (unfortunately he didn't have time yet to clean it up and release the code):
http://www.olsonsoft.com/blogs/stefanolson/post/Introduction-to-FlowDocument-for-Silverlight.aspx
Are you asking for a technical layout, or a complete component? In regards to the flow layout, all you need is to represent text, so a StackPanel with TextBlock's in should work just fine.
A TextBlock can support multiple Run elements, which pratically gives you a flow-layout.
Either way, for a phone you should look into customizing the UI to suit your needs, rather than expecting a component to do it for you. If there was a component for it, there most likely would be a app for it, and then there wouldn't be a reason to write another app for it, would there now?-)
I ended up implementing my own terminal emulation/telnet negotiation code from scratch.
Related
Recently I’ve been working on a windows wallpaper manager. It will scan multiple directories for images and have a settings window to customize. In addition, I want to bypass the built-in wallpaper and instead use a windows form based off the ideas discussed here: Setting a Windows form to be bottommost to allow for greater control over image placement. I have built the file operations to find the wallpapers, and various other support operations.
However, I am stumped on how to implement a windows form properly. Not just the one in the Stack Overflow post above. So far none of my CompSci classes (7 so far) have discussed GUIs, and thus I have no knowledge to work from. I turned to the internet to learn how to work with GUIs. While I learned plenty to start a thread, or show a form, I was never able to find anything that described the proper way to engineer an application with a GUI. All I have learned in respect to engineering the application is to limit the number of threads, and try to separate the GUI from the non-GUI related code (if that makes sense).
Like I have said, I have no clue what I am doing. If someone would be willing to give me pointers or even a link to something on this subject, that would be amazing!
EDIT: I have been using this as a learning exercise, and I have mostly been learning from trial and error, probably mostly error
To draw on the true desktop, you need to get a handle to it: GetDesktopWindow is the function to use. But to change the wallpaper you do not draw on the desktop, but instead you use the dedicated API for handling the desktop wallpaper: SystemParametersInfo(SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER, ...). There is also the legacy COM Shell interface, IActiveDesktop and IActiveDesktop::SetWallpaper.
As you can see, none of the APIs to manipulate the desktop and the wallpaper are managed (C#, .Net) so you will have to jump through some hoops to get this working from C#. If your goal is to learn C# style UI, I would recommend to stick to the 'blessed' way of doing this (winforms, WPF etc) and do not try to jump straight to p-Invoke and COM interop. Perhaps you can pick another project, eg. display the images/pictures in a carousel in a form.
If you're curious still, Google for C# and SystemParametersInfo or IActiveDesktop and you'll find examples of how to do this from managed C#, many examples right here on StackOverflow.
Bonus: of course Raymond Chen has a blog on this topic: How do I put a different wallpaper on each monitor?.
I am writing my first vb.net application ( But I will tag c# here as well, as I am sure even a c# person can answer this with the similar .net implementation).
Short Description of my Applicaiton:
My desktop application will run on win platform only, using vb.net, it is a simple internet cafe management software, with a server gui running on server, and a client gui running on workstations, both communicating with TCP/IP to allocate time to customers, and the server storing some data in either xml files ( for human operators login info e.g) or in a small database. Nothing complicated.
What I would like to do:
I'd like to have a "sexy" look, i.e. either silverlight look or win7 phone look, yet this is a desktop application. I'd like to use CSS but its entirely optional, if there is a simple way to have my controls look like below without CSS thats fine with me.
What I have tried
I have looked into just doing a silverlight out of browser app, but as I am new to .net, and even though I have read up as many articles about using silverlight5 out of browser, I don't want to be caught down the road when I want to implement a feature and realize "Oh silverlight out of box doesnt support that".
So my question is , how do I implement one of the new looks in the picture in my desktop vb app?
You should look at using WPF for your application instead of using WinForms.
WPF (Windows Presentation Foundations) is a platform which works same way as silverlight but on desktop (as far as you need to be aware now.) Silverlight is a cut down version of WPF so WPF will give you a lot more controls and a lot more control over the program.
WPF uses XAML to draw up the UI and it holds the code in the source code file associated to the xaml file. If you have experience using Silverlight you should easily be able to make programs with WPF.
WPF is really powerful and gives you access to all the styling that is possible on Silverlight. WinForms is more so restricted which makes it harder to abandon the consistent Windows look and make your own intuitive and innovative UI.
Hope it helps!
Here are some tutorials if you are interested:
WPF Tutorials
Here is an example WPF desktop app (exact same look as achievable with Silverlight)
You can use wpf with Mahapps Metro : http://mahapps.com/MahApps.Metro/
I need to capture the visual output (like a screenshot) of a DirectX window.
Currently, I use this approach.
But, when the window is in background, it captures whatever is in front of it.
I see that DirectX windows render even when minimized or in background, so this should be possible.
But, how? (It also needs to be fast, and it needs to work on Windows XP too, unfortunately...)
Edit: I am very busy these days... Don't worry, I'll put the bounty back if it expires.
To capture Direct3D windows that are in the background (or moved off screen), I believe you have the following options:
Inject and hook Direct3D within the target application via the link you have already posted or this more up-to-date example (EasyHook can be difficult to get setup but it does work really well) - you can always ask for help about getting it working. I have used that technique for capturing in a number of games without issues (most recently for an ambilight-clone project). The problem with this approach is your concern about game protection causing bans, however FRAPs also uses hooking to achieve this, so perhaps your concerns are exaggerated? I guess gamers being banned for a screen shot is an expensive way of finding out.
For windowed applications on Vista/Win 7 - you could inject and hook the DWM and make your capture requests through its shared surface. I have had this working on Vista, but have not finished getting it working on Windows 7, here is an example of it working for Windows 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G75WKeXqXkc. The main problem with this approach is the use of undocumented API's which could mean your application breaks without any warning upon a windows patch release - also you would have to redo the technique for each new major Windows flavour. This also does not address your need to capture in Windows XP.
Also within the DWM, there is a thumbnail API. This has limitations depending on what your trying to do. There is some information on this API along with other DWM API's here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/greg_schechter/archive/2006/09/14/753605.aspx
There are other techniques for intercepting the Direct3D calls without using EasyHook, such as substituting the various DLL's with wrappers. You will find various other game hooking/interception techniques here: http://www.gamedeception.net/
Simply bring the Direct3D application to the foreground (which I guess is undesirable in your situation) - this wouldn't work for off-screen windows unless you also move the window.
Unfortunately the only solution for Windows XP that I can think of is intercepting the Direct3D API in some form.
Just a clarification on Direct3D rendering while minimised. During my fairly limited testing on this matter I have found this to be application dependant; it is generally not recommended that rendering take place while the application is minimized (also this reference), it does continue to render while in the background however.
UPDATED: provided additional link to more up-to-date injection example for point 1.
A quick google and i found this Code Project which relates to Windows XP. I dont know if you can apply this knowledge to Windows Vista and 7??
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5051/Various-methods-for-capturing-the-screen
EDIT:
I found this article as well:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/20651/Capturing-Minimized-Window-A-Kid-s-Trick
This links off from Justins blog post here from the comments. It seems he was working on this with someone (i see thats your link about).
http://spazzarama.com/2009/02/07/screencapture-with-direct3d/
The code that you linked to (from spazzarama), which you said you were using in your project, captures the front buffer of your DirectX device. Have you tried capturing the back buffer instead? Going from the code on your linked site, you would change line 90 from
device.GetFrontBufferData(0, surface);
to
Surface backbuffer = device.GetBackBuffer(0, 0, BackBufferType.Mono);
SurfaceLoader.Save("Screenshot.bmp", ImageFileFormat.Bmp, backbuffer);
This would also involve removing lines 96-98 in your linked example. The backbuffer might be generated without the obstructing window.
EDIT
Nevermind all of that. I just realized that your linked sample code is using the window handle to define a region of the screen, and not actually doing anything with the DirectX window. Your sample code won't work around the obstruction because your region is already drawn with the other window in front of it by the time you access it.
Your best bet to salvage the application is probably to bring the DirectX window to the top of the screen before running the code to capture the image. You can use the Wind32API BringWindowToTop function to do that (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms632673%28VS.85%29.aspx).
How can I implement ActiveX Document on C#/.NET? (ActiveX Document can draw itself in IE)
Update: I need a solution for drawing my own document type in IE windows (like MS Word or MS Excel draw its documents in IE).
You need to dive into OLE for that purpose.
Things like IOleDocument, IOleInPlaceSite (see MSDN for that). Figure out which interfaces are needed for the client (as IE would be the container and will need to communicate with your interface implementations), and how the communication is going on, e.g. what gets called when.It's not rocket science, but I believe still a fair amount of work.
Look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.htmldocument.domdocument.aspx, it's .NET wrapper for DOM Document
My first thought is that you could use a WPF Page, which can be hosted in a WPF window or in IE.
From MSDN:
Encapsulates a page of content that can be
navigated to and hosted by Windows
Internet Explorer, NavigationWindow,
and Frame.
This is possible but it is tough.. What is bad is the lack of documentation... Microsoft has no interest in supporting this scenario. Another difficult part is debugging the boundaries between the HTML/DOM and the ActiveX control.
For what you're doing, it sounds like Silverlight would be a better choice. It only supports a subset of .Net, but it supports drawing graphics. It'll be a lot easier for you to find documentation. And it will run on non-Windows computers.
But maybe you need something Silverlight doesn't do (like audio input support). If thats the case, there's various blogs on the subject of varying quality. Here are the two that stood out as most helpful to me:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/CreateActiveXDotNet.aspx
http://blog.ianchivers.com/wordpress/?p=22
I do recommend using OleView to inspect the type libraries you produce, and make sure its what you expect. You can also do this to see how to break event properties into get/set functions, which is something I had to do to debug some scenarios.
Also be cognizant of the difference of "attaching debugger to process" with scripted or managed debugging. At some point you'll attach with one when you think you've used the other.
Several years back, I innocently tried to write a little app to save my tactically placed desktop icons because I was sick of dragging them back to their locations when some event reset them. I gave up after buring WAY too much time having failed to find a way to query, much less save and reset, my icons' desktop position.
Anyone know where Windows persists this info and if there's an API to set them?
Thanks,
Richard
If I'm not mistaken the desktop is just a ListView, and you'll have to send the LVM_SETITEMPOSITION message to the handle of the desktop.
I googled a bit for some c# code and couldn't find a example, but I did found the following article. Torry: ...get/set the positions of desktop icons?. It's delphi code, but I find it very readable and with some P/Invokes you'll be able to translate it to c#.
The desktop is just a ListView control and you can get its handle and send messages to it to move icons around using LVM_SETITEMPOSITION.
Getting icon positions using LVMGETITEMPOS is a bit more complicated, though. You have to pass a pointer to a POINT structure as your LPARAM. If you try to do that, you will likely crash Explorer. The problem is you passed it a pointer in your address space, which the control interpreted as a pointer in Explorer's address space. Ouch!
The solution I've used is to inject a DLL into the Explorer process and send the message from there. Then you just have to have a way to get the position info back to your process.
I am still looking into this and will post the result once I finally get something working. I'm posting this because, thanks indirectly to Davy's post, I also found a classic VB implementation:
Shuffle Desktop Icons Using Interprocess Memory Communication
and that will probably be the basis for my code.
I have no idea about the API, but I know Ultramon (http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/) has a feature included for preserving icon placement (although I've never used it for preserving icon location, it is indispensable for multiple monitor usage). The latest beta release works flawlessly with Vista (except for sometimes having a minor glitch or two when initially logging into my machine via RDP), and of course, haven't had any issues with XP. I've used it for over four years now.
And did I mention that it's the best utility for multiple monitor usage?
may be you want this one?I find it in 《WindowsCoreProgramming 5th》 https://github.com/wang1902568721/WindowsCoreProgramming