I have some legacy code made with Borland C++ Builder 6 that I have to port from Windows XP embedded to Windows 10 IoT.
It all seems to run properly, except dialog forms which aren't drawn properly. When I call ShowModal on the forms to show them, they flash quickly and then seems to disappear. However they are not gone, instead they are just not drawn and the form behind the dialog is seen. The dialog form buttons can still be pressed (if we know where they are).
I have tried all possible redrawing, refresh, repaint and update functions I could find, but nothing seems to work.
To make matters worse, dialogs containing actual control elements (like one containing a set of TSpeedButton elements) the controls are redrawn when moving the mouse over them, but anything else are not redrawn.
I have tried to search for similar issues but can't find anything for this.
Could this be solved? Or do we have to update to a newer Embarcadero version of the IDE to be able to solve it (which is a lot or work and not really something we can do at the moment)?
The problem was the use of a Billenium Software (now defunct) package for "fancy" transitions.
The transition in question "zooms" a dialog open, and it just doesn't seem to work. Disabling this transition will solve the problem of the disappearing dialogs.
I still don't know if it's a problem with the components Windows 10 compatibility, or with its 64-bit system compatibility.
Related
I have a UI written in Qt that makes extensive use of dock widgets, primarily so that end users can customize which which docks are available, and how they are arranged.
We recently upgraded to Qt 5.6.1, and the dock widgets can no longer be rearranged on Ubuntu, although they still work on windows and other OS's. When you try to move the docks, the rubber band still appears as usual showing the new location, but when dropped the dock just snaps back into whichever position it started in, which is always tabbed somehow.
After several hours of searching, I think the problem is related to QTBUG-54185, and I'm wondering if there is any way to work around the bug while we wait for the Qt 5.6.2 release which fixes it.
The bug is related to having the AnimatedDocks property disabled. QDockWidget rearranging still works, even in spite of the bug, for dock widgets which are animated.
The problem was that in the code, the main window was setting the dock options manually as
mainWindow->setDockOptions(AllowTabbedDocks);
Since DockOptions are OR'd, what is happening here is that the AnimatedDocks property, which is enabled by default, is being unintentionally disabled. The solution for me was to delete the offending line, since the default options are AllowedTabbedDocks|AnimatedDocks, which is actually what I wanted all along.
I have a strange issue I've been unable to diagnose and am hoping someone can at least point me in the right direction. I have a C++ MFC application that collects data from various sources and displays it on the screen. After a random interval (typically around 5-10 minutes), however, the display gets "corrupted" in a way I've never seen or have been able to track down as shown in the image below (left is normal, right is corrupt):
The basic symptoms are:
Up/down arrow images turn into "5"s and "6"s.
Opening a combo box list results in just the item text displayed (list border and scroll bar is not shown).
Background colours on some controls don't update or display correctly.
Z-order is broken and the app controls "leak" through other windows placed on top.
Pressing Print-Screen with the app in focus no longer captures the window to the clipboard.
Closing and reopening the window does nothing.
Restarting the application gets things back to normal.
Things I've tried to eliminate as a possible cause include:
Operating System & Computer: The same issue is present on a variety of systems from Windows 7-64 bit to Windows Xp-32 bit.
Multi-threading: I added a mutex to prevent the display updates from occurring at the same time but it had no effect (as expected).
Memory Corruption: This has been my assumption all along but there are no signs of memory corruption at all. The base display code has been used for years with no similar issue as well as the base networking message library.
Specific Code: I have narrowed down the issue to one specific dialog among a variety of others that show no issue. They all use the same base code which would seem to indicate the issue lies in the specific display code for the dialog. Exactly how or why the issue occurs has eluded me so far.
Any ideas on what the cause might be or how to narrow it down would be great.
Update 1:
Doing some more timing/repeatable tests and it looks like leaving this one dialog running for a short while causes the issue. The amount time is consistently between 300-400 seconds before the issue shows up.
It sounds like your application could be leaking GDI objects. To check if that is the case, open your task manager and enable the GDI Objects column. Observe the number for your process and see if it's increasing continuously.
If that is actually the case, you should read Detect and Plug GDI Leaks in Your Code with Two Powerful Tools for Windows XP. That MSDN article also offers a tool named GDILeaks.exe that should help you identify your GDI Leaks.
In the case where these symptoms surface within a short time, it should be something that is drawn repeatedly that isn't freeing GDI resources properly. Possibly in (or called within) the windows procedure (OnPaint for example).
If I'm not mistaken Windows' GUI uses a ttf(?) font for those little icons, and it looks like the font gets destroyed somehow (DeleteObject being called with font's handle?)
Im developing an application and use FlashWindowEx to flash the update window however it always manages to steal focus from full screen applications like games and such.
This is not what i want and is very annoying. Is there any way to work out whats causing it to steal focus (tried commenting out FlashWindowEx but it still did) or a way to tell it not to steal focus.
This happens on all versions of windows (including 7) and the game is launched seperatly to the application.
Check out the WS_EX_NOACTIVATE window style perhaps?
I am trying to create a tab-control that have the tab-buttons aligned from right-to-left, in Win32/c++. The WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL flag doesn't help me, as it mirrors the drawing completely both for the tab items and the tab page contents. The application itself handles the mirroring automatically (it's a cross platform UI solution), which is also a reason for us not to use WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL flag (we have mirroring implemented in a generic way for all UI frameworks/platforms).
One solution would be to override TCM_GETITEMRECT and TCM_HITTEST in the subclassed TabCtrls window procedure. This enables me to move the buttons allright, but the mouse events still acts on the positions that the control "knows" the buttons really are at (ie. mouseover on the first button invalidates the leftmost button - the coordinates are not mirrored).
So that seems to be a dead end for me.
Another possibility would be to insert padding before the first tab button, to push them all to the right edge. I haven't been able to figure out how to do that, though. Visual Studio sports this little dialog:
How did they put the buttons in front of the first tab page? Knowing this would enable me to solve this problem.
Update, solution:
The solution to my problem is to use the built-in RTL support. For this to work, the tab control must have both the WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL and WS_EX_NOINHERITLAYOUT flags. That will preserve the function of all existing drawing code while only the TabCtrl buttons are mirrored. I didn't realize that the ES_EX_NOINHERITLAYOUT flag goes on the parent (the TabCtrl), which is why I was looking for the workaround originally described.
For reference, I am still curious to have an answer to the original question, though.
If you take a look with a spy application you will see that it is not actually a normal windows tab-control but custom thing and the drawing is done by the parent window AFAIK:
Both Visual Studio and Office use a lot of custom controls, some of the features make their way into the common controls after a few years, some features stay private...
I always wondered how software such as iTunes, Winamp etc is able to create its own UI.
How is this accomplished under the Windows platform? Is there any code on the web explaining how one would create their own custom GUI?
WinAmp doesn't usually supply its own GUI at all -- it delegates that to a "skin". You can download dozens of examples and unless memory fails me particularly badly, documentation is pretty easily available as well.
From the looks of things, I'd guess iTunes uses some sort of translation layer to let what's basically written as a native Mac UI run on Windows (the same kind of thing that Apple recently decided was so evil that they're now forbidden on the iPhone and apparently the iPad).
Since saying anything that could possibly be construed as negative about Apple is often treated as heresy, I'll point to all the .xib files that are included with iTunes for Windows. An .XIB file (at least normally) is produced by Apple's Interface Builder to hold resources for OS/X programs, and compiled to a .NIB file prior to deployment. Windows doesn't normally use either .XIB or .NIB files at all, and it appears likely to me that Apple includes a compatibility layer to use them on Windows (though I've never spent any time looking to figure out what file it's stored in or anything like that).
Edit: (response to Mattias's latest comment). Rendering it is tedious but fairly straightforward. You basically take the input from the skin (for example) and create an owner draw control (e.g. a button) and render the button based on that input.
The easiest way to do this is to have fixed positions for your controls, and require the user to draw/include bitmaps for the background and controls. In this case, you just load the background bitmap and display it covering the entire client area of your application (and you'll probably use a borderless window, so that's all that shows). You'll specify all your controls as owner-drawn, and for each you'll load their bitmap and blit it to the screen for that control. Since there won't (usually) be a visible title bar, you'll often need to handle WM_NCHITTEST (or equivalent on other systems) to let the user drag the window around.
If you want to get a bit more complex, you can add things like allowing them to also specify a size and position for each control, as well as possibly specifying that some controls won't show up at all. Again, this isn't really terribly difficult to manage -- under Windows, for example, most controls are windows, and you can specify a size and position when you create a window. If the user loads a different skin at run-time, you can call MoveWindow to move/resize each control as needed.
I'm assuming that you mean creating a GUI application as opposed to a GUI framework.
There are lots of GUI frameworks available for Windows.
Some are
wxWidgets (www.wxwidgets.org)
Qt (http://qt.nokia.com/products)
And of course the venerable MFC framework (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d06h2x6e%28VS.90%29.aspx)
If you want a more complete list, look at the Wikipedia article for MFC (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d06h2x6e%28VS.90%29.aspx) and scroll to the bottom.
Each of these GUI frameworks is amply documented on the web.