Bonjour/DNS-SD on Windows - c++

I'm currently working on a cross-platform application (Win/OSX/iOS) which has a C++ (with Boost) back end. On iOS and OSX I'm using the Cocoa Net Service Browser Delegate functions to discover an embedded device via mDNS, then pass the information to the back end to create the objects it needs to communicate with it.
I wanted to take a similar approach with my Windows MFC front end and I found this article which seemed to do exactly what I want. However, it seems that using the Bonjour SDK has some really nasty side effects - forcing you to static link to MFC and in my case the only way I can get it to link properly is to not use debug DLLs at all, which is not ideal.
So, the Bonjour SDK isn't really any good for me because it imposes too many restrictions on my project. With Cocoa I'm actually using very little of the functionality - just didFindService and netServiceDidResolveAddress really. All I want to do is find the devices of a given type and get their IP addresses.
Can anyone suggest another way around this that will work with an MFC front end on Windows?

From what I have been able to gather from researching this topic just goto http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/mDNSResponder/mDNSResponder-333.10/ and grab the source. There is a VC project file which will let you build the dll how you want.

Related

program NSTouchBar with c++

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.

Receiving WebRTC call from a C++ native Windows application

I would like, from a native Windows application using C++, to receive video/audio data sent from a browser located in a remote location. It seems like WebRTC is the way to go for this.
Most information I find is about how to interact with the browser to write WebRTC apps, but it may case the data would be received by my C++ app. Is it correct that I would need to use the WebRTC Native Code package for this, which is described as being 'for browser developers'? Document is located here: http://www.webrtc.org/webrtc-native-code-package
And what if I want to send video/audio data that I generate (ie not directly coming from a webcam and microphone), would I be able to send it to the remote location browser?
Any sample code out there which does something like I'm trying to accomplish?
The wording in that link is a bit misleading. They intend people that are developing browsers to use the native code, and advise those that are developing "applications" in a browser to use the WebRTC API.
I have worked with their native code for over a year to develop an Android application that is capable of performing audio and / or video calls between other Android devices and to browsers. So, I a pretty sure that it is completely possible to to take their native code and create a Windows application (especially since they have example code that does that for Linux and Mac -- look at peerconnection client and peerconnection server for this). You might have to write and re-write code to get it to work on Windows.
As for as data that you generate. In the Android project that I worked with, we didn't rely on the Android device / system to provide us with video, we captured and sent that out our selves using the "LibJingle" / WebRTC libraries. So, I know that that is possible, as long as you provide the libraries with video data in the correct format. I would imagine that one would be able to do the same with audio, but we never fiddled with that, so I cannot say for sure.
And as for example code, I can only suggest Luke Weber's gitbug repositories. Although it is for Android, it might be of some help to look at how he interfaces with the two libraries. Probably the better code to look at is the peerconnection client stuff that comes in the "LibJingle" second of the native code. [edit]: That is located in /talk/examples/peerconection/client/ .
If you get lost from my use of "LibJingle", that will show you when I started working with all of this code. Sometime around July of 2013 they migrated "LibJingle" into the WebRTC "talk" folder. From everything that I have seen, they are the same thing, just with the location and named changed.

How to shell to another app and have it appear in a Borland VCL form (c++)

I'm actually in charge of a FIP networking c++ application, working for the first time with Embarcadero C++ Builder XE5.
The app is nearly finished, but I can't find how to implement the last feature...
I wanted to open an external Windows HyperTerminal in order to see what happen on a given COM port, for this purpose I'm using ShellExecute() to launch it from my application but it's a bit ugly since there is 2 different windows.
I was wondering if it was possible to integrate this newly opened HyperTerminal into an existing form (Panel for instance). I couldn't find nothing related excepted this =>
Delphi style, but i don't understand a byte of #mghie answer since it's delphi.
If anyone have a clue I'm really interested, even the most basic clue!
For almost all of my projects where COM port interaction is needed I use AsyncPro. The project is very well documented with a ~1000 page reference manual.
Reference Manual
Developer's Guide
For this case, the package provides a VCL terminal that simply drops onto a form. It's quite flexible with a lot of options to configure its behaviour.
I wanted something similar in past but with no success.
1.The only thing I was able to do is the exact opposite.
dock my VCL window inside another (not VCL app) but that solved my problems
If you terminal is console window then I doubt even this can be done.
anyway find handle of desired window
find handle to a dockable subcomponent
set the parent of your subwindow to it / or use manual dock
2.maybe you can do some funny stuff
like hide terminal somewhere
and continuoslly copy its graphics to your window
newer done that hide thing
but copy the contents is doable (although on windows a little unstable sometimes)
done it once to feed my App with IR-camera feed from different App
while 'focus' stays on hidden terminal it should work
also you can try to post messages to it somehow if you need the focus ...
Sorry for a vague answer but at least you see some approaches of mine
maybe someone has a better way to do this

What is the best way to use IE webBrowser control without requiring MS/Visual studio run times?

What I am trying to do is create an exe (not .hta) that can be programmed to open a local html file and have it work just like it was in IE (handle styles, scripts and etc), only without actually loading IE. The exe must also be run without installation requirements, and no dependencies (other than recent IE obviously), needed on the host machine.
The purpose is to create an interactive e-book type document, that can be edited without recompile, and also be run from cd/usb on the fly.
I can't just open IE, because it will look unprofessional with the big E, the toolbar and tabs all at the top. know what I mean?
I have experience with HTA, and this was my first suggestion, however I would like to take advantage of the auto run from cd, and also to make the form border a little different, less plain.
I also have experience in VB. Which I could accomplish the look and functionality, however those vbruntimes are not installed on some machines :(
Is it possible to use the IE webBrowser control from c++ or even assembly?
Thanks in advance!
It appears, Lucian Wischik's Webform can be a good starting point to meet your minimalistic project requirements. Alternatively, you could host WebBrowser ActiveX control directly using ATL AxHost. ATL can be linked statically and adds a very low size overhead to the final EXE. Here is a sample project of WebBrowser host app which only depends on ATL.
Yes, you can use the browser component from C++.
C++ however will again need runtime libraries, similar to VB. The good news is, you can statically link those runtime libraries with the executable.
You will not be able to statically link the browser component with your executable, but that wont be an issue unless you try to support ancient Windows versions (pre NT 4.0). For all more recent Windows versions, you can pretty much assume that this component is available.
For more details on that component, you may refer to the CHtmlView class reference - that is the MFC wrapped version of that WebBrowser activeX component.
Using that component from assembler certainly is possible as well, but unless you are deeeeeeep into system programming on the windows platform, you will fail.

Detecting new device insert in C++

I've tried to find a way to detect when a new device (like a USB) is inserted into a computer, but everything I've seen required MFC, which I don't have. Is there a way to do this without MFC? If not, I understand, but I haven't seen anything of the like in my Google searches.
Thanks,
C++ by itself does not have any platform-dependent hardware-level functionality. You will need to use some API, like Win32 or MFC or .NET on Windows.
You can do this using libusb and there's a port of libusb for win32, so you might have some luck using that instead of MFC, with the added bonus of being more portable.
Handle the WM_DEVICECHANGE message.
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363480(v=vs.85).aspx
EDIT: Of course, this is Windows only, which the OP didn't specify. There's no way to do this without external libraries or platform specific APIs.