I am new to .Net and hitting the brick wall trying to resolve this....
Having done enough googling for the past few days I've come across nothing but some vague (at lease for me) C# related info
Basically, I am trying to set up a few global hooks to carry out certain automation process. Since the development environment is VS2008 C++ windows forms, I started by compiling a native Dll to be injected by the calling prog. The strategy being for the callback proc in native dll calling a function in .Net program (or maybe a wrapper managed dll), passing the filtered raw data (keyboard/mouse/WM_create/etc) messages for further processing.
Question: How do I pass on the handle of such function(s) to my injected dll?
Is the managed wrapper dll path an easier choice or simply have the managed & native functions residing side by side in the main application?
I'll have to do a lot of Marshalling which is yet another dark side of the matter. Is there a link to precise documentation/examples of marshalling functions?
I thank you for your help in advance.
Mark
Have a look at 'Marshal.GetFunctionPointerForDelegate'
Related
The problem
I would like to use c++ to create an application that uses the new macbook pro touch bar. However I am not able to find any really good resources. And apple does not have any docs on using c++ to program the touch bar.
What I have done
I found this article on c++ and the touch bar, However I cannot find either of the header files for the script GLFW/glfw3.h and GLFW/glfw3native.h. These both seem critical to the script working.
More on the issue
Even if the above article's script works, there are no official docs for programing the touch bar with c++ (That I know of). I think that this is an important thing to have given the fact that many, if not most applications are written in c/c++.
Thank you in advance for the help!
So the article that you link to basically does not need the GLFW/glfw3.h and GLFW/glfw3native.h files if you are not using GLFW.
What UI framework are you using for your C++ app?
Unless it is still using Carbon, at the lowest level, the framework will be creating NSWindows to actually have windows in the UI. You need to get access to the NSWindow that your framework is using to host it the UI. If it is still using Carbon, I think you are probably not going to be able to accomplish this.
If the framework provides some mechanism to get the native platform window (which will be an NSWindow), you would replace the author's call to glfwGetCocoaWindow(window); with the correct call from your framework.
If the framework does not provide access to the NSWindow, then you will need to use the code that is commented out at the bottom of the article to attach your touchbar to the windows in your app.
Please note that all that code is Obj-C code; you'll need to have at least one .m or .mm file in your project to provide that Obj-C glue code to get access to the touchbar. Basically that code is a C-calleable wrapper around the Cocoa API.
Also note that you'll need to expand the list of buttons and actions for all the different things you want to put in the touchbar. You could add your own wrapping API so that the construction of the toolbar is done from C++ and registers actions that call-back into your C++ app to handle the events.
Fundamentally though, the touchbar is not available on any other platform, so there is no great benefit to trying to avoid writing Obj-C to implement your touchbar as that code will only run on macOS anyway. If you use .mm files to implement Obj-C++ for this code, you can still call into your C++ objects from your touchbar code.
I have a legacy Win32 application (WndProcs, etc) that needs to consume a COM object. With the use of a little ATL headers and some smart pointers that was a snap, however what I'm currently struggling with is how best to sink the events coming off that COM object?
My current working plan has been to build a second COM object (as a dll) that handles all the sinking and uses windows messages to communicate with the legacy application. This is "ok" but there's a lot of cruft moving messages back and forth to make the legacy application do what I want.
Is there a readily accessible way to get the Win32 legacy application to sink COM events directly vs running through the second "sinker" com object?
Before I go to far down this process I wanted to see if anyone else ran across this before and had a working solution.
Thanks!
Stumbled across this excellent write up by the always brilliant Raymond Chen.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/06/12/10425215.aspx
As WhozCraig indicated above, all I needed was the Interface pointer and to setup the Advise, handle the Invoke.
Nice and clean.
Thanks!
I have an application developed in VB 6.0. I don't have access to its code. This application also exposes its functionality through certain API provided in its dlls. Is there a way for me to check what methods of the API the consumers of this application's API are calling across anywhere the API is deployed. I want a C# program to just sit in that target environment and intercept the calls made to that API and report it back to my service via a service. I wont be modifying the API or the code calling the API. Is this possible in C# or would I need to go with C++?
Update
Lets say for sake of simplicity, that its a simple VB application developed in VB 6 called SimpleAPP, and it has a button that displays records in a grid. It does this by calling a component CMPA.dll with a public method GetRecords(string ID) which returns an Array of records. I have another few applications called CustomerApp.exe and AnotherCustomerApp.exe which also have a reference to CMPA.dll and they both calls this same method to get the records. Now, I want to develop a program called Interceptor.exe that will actually sit in the environment where CustomerApp and AnotherCustomerApp is deployed and will log internally which of these two applications called that CMPA dll's public method GetRecords and also log what parameter it sent in and what results were retrieved.
I had to google to find the library that was on the tip of my tongue.
That googling turned up some interesting articles: a new to me 1999 Microsoft Research article called “Intercepting and Instrumenting COM Applications” and an Microsoft Systems Journal article from january 1999 that I do remember, “Building a Lightweight COM Interception Framework”.
The library you want is probably Microsoft Detours. I have only used it from C++, not from C#, and I have only used it for intercepting calls to Windows API functions, not COM methods, so I can’t guarantee that it’s well suited. But it's not exactly rocket science to interface these two languages, if needed.
If Detours doesn’t turn out to fill your needs, then look at the articles cited. Quite possibly they resulted in some framework you can use. And otherwise they have the information you need to build your own. You might then also check out if ParkPlace ever made what you want. There was once great interest in “cross concern“ functionality, and ParcPlace did some of the most interesting research, as I recall.
This is a followon to a prior question I posted (see here). I'm trying to call my native/C++ code from Javascript running in an HTML page. The answer in the referenced question was to create a COM object. The Javascript can then create an instance of the COM object and invoke methods on it getting to the native/C++ code.
So now I'm left with trying to create a simple COM object to accept the call from the Javascript. It looks like the way to go is to create a DLL and put the COM object in that DLL. Years ago I did tons of reading on COM and have tried to forget it since then :) Now I'm getting a headache wondering how to go about this easily without becoming an expert in COM.
Is there a simple/easy way to setup a DLL with a COM object that you would recommend?
EDIT: My application is written using native C++/Win32/MFC. I have an MFC dialog which uses the IE ActiveX browser control to render locally generated HTML. Currently the button handler code is all in Javascript, but as you can see from the referenced question, my goal is to handle it on the C++ side.
As I know the easy and fast way to create COM objects is to create an ATL project.
here's a nice tutorial that explains the steps to follow.
I wrote a device controller (rs232) and it is being used successfully, however users want to view data and control the device (or perhaps communicate through my program) from Excel. I dismissed DDE as an option and found that RTD (IRtdServer) is probably a good start (though no way to send data back to the "server" from the real time data client).
I found these resources for the RTD part:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=327215
and
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=327215
This is a multi-threaded app and I had already added the ability to have multiple listeners on the com port so that I could update multiple clients. I will add the COM interface to the EXE.
But what I need after that is some way of controlling my app/proxying commands to the device through my app from Excel.
What would be the best way to do that?
Perhaps another COM interface and calling it from VBA or something? I am not familiar with using scripting from Excel, so perhaps someone can provice sample code or links that show both the code for a COM object and the accompanying VB(A?) code?
Keep in mind that this is an unmanaged C++ application and it cannot be converted to managed or C# right now. Alternatives using C# are welcome as well, but that is a long-term rewrite.
Thanks
EDIT
I have an alternative to adding COM support into the existing EXE. I think it is more flexible to add a two-way communications (cross platform - maybe boost or corba or just straight IP based with my own message protocol)
A COM server (or two) can wrap that communications channel - whatever it is. This doesn;t really affect my question at all - I still would like to know the options for controlling an external EXE from Excel.
EDIT
Not having to roll out .NET to customers is also an big plus. many of these devices are on PCs that are pretty old and have perhaps NT or XP on them and I don't relish increasing my setup/install package from 700KB to the ridiculous .NET install size...
Option #1:
Create a small COM server - make sure its interfaces are suitable for scripting with the built Visual Basic engine in Excel. (e.g. use simple types and BSTRS).
Write Excel VB Macros to (1) add your own tool bar to excel and (2) call your COM server.
You can also add buttons and other UI elements to sheets and hook them them up to VB macros.
Option #2:
I realize that you do not want to use C# - but automating office, and talking to COM objects is really, really easy in C# with Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). You shoul really look into this option - If done correctly, it shouldn't mean re-writing any of your existing code. Just use C# and VSTO as a bridge between Excel and your RTD server. As with VB, its straight froward to connect UI elements in Excel to C# and then to your RTD server.
Calling a COM object from VBA is straightforward. This SO Question and my answer give an example of how to create a COM object. Calling exposed methods is as you would expect:
object.ExposedMethod(optional params...);