AFX/MFC Intercept ALL command messages - mfc

I'm attempting to use CMFCCmdUsageCounter to track command usage in my program. This class requires I call AddCmd(ID_COMMAND); every time the ID_COMMAND is handled/sent.
Since my program has thousands of ID_COMMAND's, which are handled throughout millions of lines of code...This seems unfeasible.
I'm hoping there is some simple way to intercept ALL commands sent within my program. Is it possible to override the SendMessage()/PostMessage() functions?(not even sure this would get all commands) Maybe there is some MFC function that passes every command through my virtual function, before passing it on like normal.
I'm sorry my understanding of MFC/AFX messages is limited. Any help in attempting to track ID_COMMAND usage is welcome.

Take a look at SetWidowsHookEx. In particular, I would start with the WH_GETMESSAGE type hook. A combination of hooks may give you what you need.

Related

Using wh_shell hook for custom windows-shell(explorer.exe replacement program) C++

So I have spent that past week and a half working on code to simply setup the hook procedure for wh_shell for a program that will replace explorer.exe in the registry and will run as the main desktop program. There seems to be very little information and sources for using this outside of just the windows API which is a bit undescriptive and doesn't explain everything to a great detail. For some reason I just cant get it to work, no matter if I run it inside of explorer.exe, or if I replace the register and make it the default shell. I'm going to ask a couple of things in this post because I think that if you can answer one of these questions you likely have the answer to more.
So first I just have a question about hooks in general: When I run the SetWindowsHookEx(...) function -resource below- it says for var lpfn that a dll is not necessary if the hook is only used to monitor the current process. Now obviously when monitoring events such as window_created, those are events within a different processes which makes me think that the hookproc has to be within a DLL(which is how ive programmed so far). But this is questionable to me because when u are running SetWindowsHookEx(...) the process I wish to monitor do not yet exist until the user decides to start them. Do these processes notify the system when wh_shell events are being done so that I my hook doesnt need to get placed into every process upon creation, or is it more like when I run SetWindowsHookEx(...) with wh_shell that it will place a hook in all processes when the are created. The second resource states that the system just calls the hookproc when these things happen, so then do I even need a DLL, or what process does it need to be hooked to because I dont think it needs to be hooked into everything.
So second I have a question regarding setting my process as default shell - see resources - the resource states any process that registers itself as the default shell(which I assume is just modifying the registry to my process, if not and there is more please let me know) needs to call the SystemsParameterInfo(...) function. So first, does this func need to be called before running SetWindowsHookEx(...) or is there some expected spot it should be elsewhere in my code? Then in regards to the other variables it doesnt specify for, just curious what the recommended would be to set them as, like what are they set as for explorer.exe, and maybe a few other examples(including things NOT to do).
Finally for the sake of testing, using the console will be the most helpful to me here. The console will be used for input to run functions and commands for now(like open the register and swap back the shell to explorer.exe). If my hookproc is within a DLL, I need it to output some messages, I dont want to muddle the same console and I also dont even know if it will output to the same console, so what might be a recommended or potential solution for outputs(again this is temporary and for testing so it doesnt have to be perfect or even great)?
Also I would think windows 11 shouldn't be an issue, but I havent tested on windows 10 system...
I havent included any code as Im pretty sure most of this stuff can be answered without it and that its so few lines of code that its not like typical questions where its like examine my code and help me, maybe some example code you can show me would be really helpful.
Thankyou!
SetWindowsHookEx(...)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-setwindowshookexa
defaultShell
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winmsg/about-hooks#wh_shell
regards to WH_SHELL section
Testing Environment:
Windows 11 vm running in Hyper-V Manager
You haven't mentioned an important parameter in your description and that is the last argument of SetWindowsHookEx, the thread id.
When it is set to 0 then ..
'[in] Specifies the identifier of the thread with which the hook procedure is to be associated. If this parameter is zero, the hook procedure is associated with all existing threads running in the same desktop as the calling thread.'
That said, then like everything in Windows programming nothing is as what the documentation states, its as if the documentation is a wish-list Microsoft will like Windows to be when it grows up.
Actually even if you manage to get everything right you will see that the shell messages you will get will be VERY few compared to what the documentation states.
I am working on the same issue and when I get it going I will post the results here.

User Interface doesn't update output with position data

I am creating a user interface using (Qt) and I am attaching it to my C/C++ motion application using shared memory as my form of Inter Process Communication.
I currently have a class which I created in my motion application that has many members. Most of these members are used to update data on the UI and some of them get updated about 20 to 50 times a second, so it is pretty fast (the reason being because it is tracking motion). My problem is that the data is not getting updated on the UI frequently. It gets updated every few seconds. I was able to get it work using other variables made in structures from my application by using "volatile" however it does not seem to be working for members of my class. I know that the problem is not on the UI (Qt) side, because I saw that the actual member data was not being updated in my application, even though I have commands every cycle to update the data.
I was pretty sure the problem is that some optimization is occurring since I do not have my members declared as volatile as in my structures, but when I made them volatile it still did not work. I found that when I through a comment to print out in the function that updates my motion data within my motion application, the UI updates much more frequently as if the command to print out the comment deters the compiler form optimizing out some stuff.
Has anyone experienced this problem or have a possible solution?
Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks ahead of time!
EDIT:
The interface does not freeze completely. I just updates every few seconds instead of continuously as I intended for it to do. Using various tests I know that the problem is not on the GUI or shared memory side. The problem lies strictly on the motion application side. The function that I am calling is below: int
`motionUpdate(MOTION_STAT * stat)
{
positionUpdate(&stat->traj);
}
`
where
positionUpdate(){stat->Position = motStatus.pos_fb;}
Position is a class member that contains x, y, and z. The function does not seem to update the position values unless I put a printed out comment before positionUpdate(). I don't track the change in shared memory to update the UI, but instead just update the UI every cycle.
Especially Given you are using Qt, I would strongly advise not using "native" shared memory, but to use signals instead. Concurrency using message-passing (signals/slots is one such way) is much, much easier to reason about and debug than trying to share memory.
I would expect your problem with updating is that the UI isn't being called enough of the time, so there is a backlog of updating to do.
Try putting in some code that throws away updates if they happen less than 0.3 seconds apart and see if that helps. You may wish to tune that number but start at the larger end.
Secondly, make sure there aren't any "notspots" in your app, in which the GUI thread is not being given the chance to run. If there are, consider putting code into another thread or, alternatively, calling processEvents() within that part of the code.
If the above really isn't what's happening, I would suggest adding more info about the architecture of your program.

Calling a function after another function is called

I'm programming a controller for use with Ableton Live 8 using the Python-based API. In my code I use a method provided in the API to watch for changes in a property's value, and call a function whenever the value changes. My goal is to change the color of the clip when the value change is noticed.
I have my code completed, and it compiles without error. From Ableton's log:
742234 ms. RemoteScriptError: RuntimeError
742234 ms. RemoteScriptError: :
742234 ms. RemoteScriptError: Changes cannot be triggered by notifications
742234 ms. RemoteScriptError:
It appears this is the result of using the built-in notification system to make a change to the live set during notification. Triggering the actual change AFTER the listening function has finished executing should work. Is this possible using Python?
Edit for clarification:
currently we have
value change noticed, function called
function attempts to change the clips color (results in error)
we need
listener notices value change, function called
function finds the new color value
function execution ends
another function is called outside the listener's scope, and changes the clips color
I did a lot in M4L and know this error by heart :)
I'm afraid you can't do anything about that - to my noob eyes it looks like a built-in security mechanism so you can't loop (Something changed? Change it! Something changed...).
In M4L i used Javascript Tasks to separate the steps (Tasks forget nearly everything),
something like
Observer -> Something changed
Create a Task that reacts
task.execute() or task.schedule(time)
Maybe the python threading module can achieve something similar?
BTW, if you happen to understand anything about the _Framework-Tasks, let me know.
I was having the same issue trying to delete a track from a clip stop listener, then I found this thread and followed #user2323980 suggestion.
There seems to be a "_tasks" object on every Framework class (I found it throught log_message inside ClipSlotComponent and ControlSurface) that handles concurrency between tasks. And it's really simple to use it:
self._tasks.add(Task.run(func, args))
I found some uses of it on Push and MK2 scripts, those are good references.

Passing arguments to a program using another program

I have created two executables that accept command line arguments. Now, I want to pass arguments to available executables using C++ (executing on Windows). What is the best way of doing it?
I have used CreateProcess(); it's working fine for static input but I want to input dynamically through CLI.
The command-line (with arguments) is one of the parameters to CreateProcess(). Just put whatever arguments you want to pass on to the child executable in there.
What problems are you having with non-static input?
I usually use system(const char*) and it works for me :)
You pass over a string which contains the command as you type it in the command line. In your case it means the path to the exe file and the arguments it takes, with just spaces in between. It runs the specified process as if it was run from command-line.
For more information: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdlib/system/
It sounds as though you already understand that string arguments can be sent via CreateProcess at launch time. If you want to continue to send data at run time, you have a couple options.
Use console redirection. Since you are already using the Win32 API, it is not too far of a stretch to write to cin of the child process after you have launched it. See this MSDN article. I think this might be what you mean by "input dynamically through CLI"
Use some sort of IPC. There are Win32 ways of doing this such as message queues, and more platform independent methods such as Protocol Buffers, Thrift, or Boost.Interprocess.
There is really more than one way to skin a cat when it comes to IPC and your goal is to do your research and make sure you have made the correct design decisions early on for how your processes will communicate.
If you do decide to use a more full-blown IPC rather than something like console redirection to solve a smaller problem, some questions you should ask yourself are:
Will I be able to send all the types of data using this type of IPC?
Will this communication ever need to cross network boundaries?
And, the two big questions that always show up are:
How maintainable will this be in the future?
Will this code ever have to run on another platform?
Hopefully this response is not overkill for your question.

How to use gprof to profile a daemon process without terminating it gracefully?

Need to profile a daemon written in C++, gprof says it need to terminate the process to get the gmon.out. I'm wondering anyone has ideas to get the gmon.out with ctrl-c? I want to find out the hot spot for cpu cycle
Need to profile a daemon written in C++, gprof says it need to terminate the process to get the gmon.out.
That fits the normal practice of debugging daemon processes: provision a switch (e.g. with command line option) which would force the daemon to run in foreground.
I'm wondering anyone has ideas to get the gmon.out with ctrl-c?
I'm not aware of such options.
Though in case of gmon, call to exit() should suffice: if you for example intend to test say processing 100K messages, you can add in code a counter incremented on every processed message. When the counter exceeds the limit, simply call exit().
You also can try to add a handler for some unused signal (like SIGUSR1 or SIGUSR2) and call exit() from there. Thought I do not have personal experience and cannot be sure that gmon would work properly in the case.
I want to find out the hot spot for cpu cycle
My usual practice is to create a test application, using same source code as the daemon but different main() where I simulate precise scenario (often with a command line switch many scenarios) I need to debug or test. For the purpose, I normally create a static library containing the whole module - except the file with main() - and link the test application with the static library. (That helps keeping Makefiles tidy.)
I prefer the separate test application to hacks inside of the code since especially in case of performance testing I can sometimes bypass or reduce calls to expensive I/O (or DB accesses) which often skews the profiler's sampling and renders the output useless.
As a first suggestion I would say you might try to use another tool. If the performance of that daemon is not an issue in your test you could give a try to valgrind. It is a wonderful tool, I really love it.
If you want to make the daemon go as fast as possible, you can use lsstack with this technique. It will show you what's taking time that you can remove. If you're looking for hot spots, you are probably looking for the wrong thing. Typically there are function calls that are not absolutely needed, and those don't show up as hot spots, but they do show up on stackshots.
Another good option is RotateRight/Zoom.