Does Windows provide some sort of mechanism to detect when an app running in fullscreen mode (e.g. games, media players, etc.) exits fullscreen mode, either returning to windowed mode or exiting its process?
There is no such thing as "fullscreen mode" or "windowed mode" as far as the OS is concerned. A window simply has dimensions, which may happen to be the same as the screen dimensions or not. The application that owns the window controls that behavior, not the OS, so only the application knows when it is displaying the window in "full screen" or "windowed" mode.
That being said, the application may optionally call ChangeDisplaySettings/Ex() with the CDS_FULLSCREEN or CDS_RESET flag when changing modes. That will send WM_DISPLAYCHANGE notifications to all top-level windows, but it will not tell them that a fullscreen window is being displayed or not.
As for detecting process termination, WMI has an event for that. See Receiving Event Notifications Through WMI.
A simple approach to this, and what I decided to go with, is using RegisterWaitForSingleObject on the created process as explained here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22418949/1019385
I found it more approachable than the WMI solution.
Related
OK, I get it: focus stealing is evil. Or at least it is 99.9% of the time. But I really need to steal the focus reliably on Windows 8, and so far I'm thwarted by the hordes of people insisting focus stealing is always evil.
Scenario: we run a custom application on an ordinary PC running Windows 8.1 (soon to be Windows 10). The screen, keyboard and mouse sit roughly 5m off the ground up some stairs that the forklift operator really shouldn't climb. The one input device they have is a numeric keypad on an extender cable down at their level. Everything they need to do they can do from that keypad... so long as some evil program hasn't stolen our application's focus, or some remote user hasn't logged out and left another application with focus.
The application is essentially a maximised desktop application - it fills the screen (but is not strictly a "full screen" or "topmost" application), and therefore allows other applications to appear in front of it when required. But when the mouse goes idle, we want this application to resume its "normal" position in front of all other applications so that it gets focus and the numeric keypad input will work reliably.
On Windows 7, using SetForegroundWindow() (enabled by AllowSetForegroundWindow() works fine - the application can be brought back to the front and resume focus. On Windows 8, SetForegroundWindow() only results in the taskbar icon flashing, but the application does not regain focus, forcing our user to climb the stairs... where the full keyboard and mouse is too tempting for them not to press buttons they shouldn't, and chaos typically ensues.
So please sir: can our (MFC, desktop) application steal back the focus once the mouse has gone idle for 1 minute, because it is more or less the only application that should normally be running anyway. If that is permitted, how do we steal it reliably?
Configure hotkeys on numeric keypad (RegisterHotKey).
Pressing a registered hotkey gives you the foreground activation love by Raymond Chen
After you call the RegisterHotKey function to register a hotkey, the
window manager will send you a WM_HOTKEY message when the user presses
that hotkey, and along with it, you will get the foreground love. If
you call SetForegroundWindow from inside your hotkey handler, the
foreground window will change according to your instructions.
Possible solution (with major limitations): do nothing extra; wait.
One of our service technicians observed that on the third or fourth attempt to regain focus using AllowSetForegroundWindow() and SetForegroundWindow() as had been working on Windows 7, Windows 8 finally allowed our application to regain focus. It is not clear what the conditions are that make this work, or if it works reliably, but we have now observed our application regaining focus from beneath Chrome, from beneath another (self-developed) MFC application, and from beneath a third party application - all desktop applications. Approximately 3-4 minutes needed to elapse in each case before focus was surrendered back to our (desktop) application.
However, we have not witnessed it regain focus from beneath metro applications, and nor do we expect it (e.g. hit the Windows key and leave the system lingering on the Start screen).
In our (restricted) situation, we are willing to take the gamble that our users will not launch a metro application that obscures our desktop application, at least not without restoring our application, since their business relies on it. Our main concern is that one of our busy service technicians will log in remotely, get distracted, and carelessly leave one of our desktop utilities with the focus. Waiting 3-4 minutes appears to be a solution to this specific scenario.
I would try it in this way:
Setup a timer in you application. That checks GetForegroundWindow on a regular basis.
If GetForgroundWindow does not belong to your process (GetWindowThreadProcessId)
If a different process onws the foreground window use AttachThreadInput and attach your input queue to the input queue of the other process.
Now use SetForegoundWindow and detach the thread input again.
Now you can use SetFocus as needed to control the input focus of your program.
Background
I'm implementing a simple WIN32 application consist of a window.
The user may show/hide the window using a special hotkey. I register the hotkey using RegisterHotKey and respond to WM_HOTKEY
Problem
if user plays a game and accidentally (or not accidentally) press the hotkey combination, then my window pops up and as a result the game is minimized.
Question
Is there a (native) way to know that the user is in gaming mode, or any other special mode, that I could disable the hotkey response
Note
I would also like if windows would make this a feature while I play games. For example don't respond to WinKey+D while I'm in gaming mode.
You can use the SHQueryUserNotificationState function to determine whether the user is playing a full screen D3D game. It will report QUNS_RUNNING_D3D_FULL_SCREEN.
I'm part of the SFML Team and we're currently looking into a feature to "request" window focus. The goal is to get very similar behavior across Windows, OS X and Linux.
For Windows one gets the rather simple SetForegroundWindow function via the WinAPI, which has a few condition as to how the window actually gets focus. The most important part to notice here is, that it only gets focus if it's from the same foreground process.
On OS X it's possible to get the focus for the active app only and otherwise let the icon bounce, i.e. notification.
Here comes the problem now, we'd like to get the same behavior on Linux as well, meaning the window should get focus if the window belongs to the active/foreground process and otherwise it should generate a notification. What would be the closest thing to that with X11?
There are already a few suggestions on the issue tracker of SFML, but none of them are actually implementing this behavior.
"User Story"
I guess developers can think of different things when being confronted with different technical names, as such here's the issue from a user perspective.
There are mainly two situations in which requesting focus is needed:
Sometimes when starting an application that uses a console window in the background, it can happen that the console window gets the focus instead of the actual GUI window. When this happens it's rather annoying for the user having to click on the window first. Since the console window and the GUI window are from the same application there's no harm done in switching the focus to the GUI window.
When one is writing an application that supports multiple windows, there might be situations where the application should decide which window gets the focus and again since the window belong to the same application there's no harm done in switching the focus from one GUI window to the other GUI window.
Further more if a different application has the focus/is being used then it's not okay to steal the focus and as such we just want to get the user's attention. For Windows that might be a blinking taskbar or for OS X that might be a jumping icon.
The current implementation seems to work fine on OS X and Windows, butwe're unsure about the X11 implementation. Thus the question is: How would one go about switching the window focus if the currently focussed window has been created by the same application that makes the focus request and otherwise create some kind of notification. For the notification we're/I'm not even sure if there's some generic way of doing it with X11.
In X11, "focus" means "the keyboard focus", that is, the window that gets the keyboard input. The window that has the focus is not necessarily in the foreground. This depends on your window manager focus policy. Most can be configured to have "click-to-focus" or "point-to-focus" policy. If you are interested in the keyboard focus, use XSetInputFocus. If you want to bring your window to the foreground, use XRaiseWindow.
It is OK to call RaiseWindow and XSetInputFocus once, when the application starts. It is also OK to bring a window to the foreground/set focus as a response to a user interaction with that or some other window of the same application. But it's not OK to do so as a response to some background event (time passed, file downloaded etc).
The standard X11 method of drawing attention to a window is setting the urgency hint. This will normally flash or bounce the icon, depending on your window manager. Do not forget to unset the hint when the user finally interacts with the window.
I think all of this has been discussed in the thread you have linked. I'm not quite sure which concerns are still left unanswered. Nothing can implement the exact same behaviour as with the other windowing systems, simply because X11 is not those windowing systems, and it's totally OK. X11, Mac OS X and Windows all behave differently and the users know and expect that. It would annoy me to no end if some application on X11 decided to behave exactly like it does on Windows, instead of toeing the X11 party line.
I'm trying to reverse engineer (OllyDbg) an application (game) that disables (captures/intercepts/blocks) all global hot keys while its window (D3D) is active (except Ctrl-Alt-Del).
My question is in which ways could such application capture/disable global hot keys (including the winkey, CTRL+Esc, and global hotkeys set in other applications) while its window is active?
It seems to use DirectInput (if that matters). I see that it doesn't set any low level hooks (SetWindowsHookEx). In which other ways could such a thing it be done?
Observations made:
When the application is suspended (while its window is still in focus) the hot keys are still disabled while the window is in focus. Switching window to something else enables them. Switching back to the suspended applications window disables the hot keys again.
If doing the same thing but suspending the application after the window lost focus, and then switching back to the suspended window, hot keys are fully working.
Edit: The application appears to block global hotkeys set with RegisterHotKey, but does not disable any hotkeys made with help of a hook (SetWindowsHookEx).
The experiment above seems to indicate that it's some setting related to the window, that works even tho the app is suspended. Could it be some kind of DirectInput setting? (Altho the only DINPUT API function call I see is DINPUT8.DirectInput8Create.)
I'm doing this in hope of changing this behavior to make the hot keys from other applications work as usual while the games window is focused. Any ideas and tips appreciated.
Exactly as Hans Passant suggested in the comments, it was DirectInput causing this behavior, due to the DISCL_EXCLUSIVE flag set with IDirectInputDevice8::SetCooperativeLevel.
I am developing an application for PocketPC. When the application starts the custom function SetScreenOrientation(270) is called which rotates the screen. When the application closes the function SetScreenOrientation(0) is called which restores the screen orientation.
This way the screen orientation isn't restored if the user minimizes the application and this is not acceptable.
Does anyone know where (in which event handlers) should SetScreenOrientation(int angle) be called to set the screen orientation on application start, restore orientation on minimize, set the orientation on maximize and restore the orientation on close?
Actually I don't know which event handler handles the Minimize and Maximize event.
The correct message is WM_SIZE, but Daemin's answer points to the wrong WM_SIZE help topic. Check the wParam. Be careful as your window may be maximized but hidden.
Going from my Windows CE experience you should handle either the WM_SIZE or WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED messages. If you're working on PocketPC I would suggest you take a look at the WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED message first because I'm not sure the WM_SIZE has the right parameters that you need.
From the WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED message's WINDOWPOS structure take a look at the flags member, specifically SWP_SHOWWINDOW and SWP_HIDEWINDOW.
The specific version of the messages that you need to look at vary with what operating system you're using. The Pocket PC OS is built on Windows CE 3.0 (and lower), while Windows Mobile is now built on Windows CE 5.0 (even Windows Mobile 6), but was also built on Windows CE 4. (Source)
So just look under the relevant section in MSDN for the OS that you're writing for.
I don't know what these are called in the C++ world, but in .NET Compact Framework your application form's Resize event would be called when you minimize/maximize a window, and then in the event code you would check the WindowState property of the form to see if its minimized or mazimized.
Altering the state of your PDA from within your application is risky (although there are lots of good reasons to do it), because if your app crashes it will leave the PDA in whatever state it was in. I've done a lot of kiosk-type (full-screen) apps in Windows Mobile, and one of the tricks to doing this effectively is to hide the WM title bar (the top row with the Windows start button) to keep it from flashing up for a split second every time you open a new form. If the app crashes, the windows bar remains invisible until you reset the device, which isn't good. At least with screen rotation the user can restore it manually.
It really depends on the platform, but I'd go with WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED or the OnShow. It's not wm_size.. That one is not always thrown on all platforms. Casio's don't throw the size event when you'd expect them to. TDS and Symbol's do.
Even though the MSDN is a great sourse for info, remember not all OS's are created equal. In the PPC world the hardware provider gets to create their own OS and sometimes the miss things, or purposfully ignore things.
I've got a platform here (name withheld to protect... well me) that has left and right buttons.. When you press them, you'd expect to be able to catch VK_LEFT, VK_RIGHT.. You'd be wrong. You actually get ';' or ':'. How's that for a kick in the pants.