Setting Screen.MousePointer to HourGlass has no effect on startup - vb6

I am fixing up an old VB6 app that has a significant amount of work in the Form_Load event. As a result, it takes several seconds for the app to actually appear after the user double-clicks it.
I tried setting Screen.MousePointer = vbHourGlass at the top of Form_Load, but it has no effect.
I've also tried adding DoEvents and Me.Refresh, also to no avail. As a result of this, the user has no indication that anything is going on during this time.
What can I do to show the hourglass when the user double-clicks on the app?

Before call form, set screen.mousepointer=11
screen.mousepointer=11
myform.show
screen.mousepointer=0

You need to allow the form to load, you can't do any GUI stuff until that's happened. Use a timer to run your initilising code and show the mouse as an hourglass while this is going on, or a splash screen with a progress bar.
http://www.vb6.us/tutorials/multiple-form-splash-screen-tutorial

Related

Is it possible in wxwidgets to determine if the window is currently visible?

In my wxWidgets (wxPython) app, I am using a 50 ms timer to do some polling and update a window if there are any changes. If changes are detected it calls wxWindow.Refresh to update the window, and the actual updating of the widgets is done in the EVT_PAINT handler. It would be nice if I could disable the painting and/or the timer if the user is not looking at the window anyway. However EVT_PAINT is still being fired even if the window is iconized or hidden behind a different window.
Is there any way to detect if the window is not currently visible on screen, or to prevent EVT_PAINT events from firing unnecessarily?
There is the IsActive method and the EVT_ACTIVATE event to test whether the window has focus, but I want to keep updating the window if it is unfocussed but still visible. The wxWindow.IsShown family of functions doesn't help, they still return True for hidden/iconized windows.
IsShownOnScreen() could help with the iconized case. Edit: But actually does not.
Or you could trap wxEVT_ICONIZE to detect when the window is minimized.
But to be honest I'm rather surprised that refreshing a window hidden behind another one still results in a repaint. If the window in front is not transparent, this really shouldn't happen.

Mouse pointer state in Windows applications doesn't change until mouse moves

Did anyone notice that in Windows applications the mouse pointer doesn't change from Hourglass back to normal until you move the mouse?
So even if your application has finished a task and the mouse pointer has been set to go back to default, it will stay as an hourglass until you move the mouse. What is the reason for this, and can be it resolved?
I'm not sure if other people have noticed this but it is quite strange and it might be some kind of event-driven way to conserve OS resources.
The dialog box should maintain the logic of the hourglass. The worker thread should send a message to the dialog itself, telling it to start maintaining an hourglass thread. (You could test this by adding a temporary button to the dialog which starts and stops the hourglass.)
Another thing to be aware of is that having a second process set the hourglass of the first is an odd thing to do. An hourglass should only happen due to user action. While an hourglass is up, typically the only action that should be available to the user is "Cancel [whatever operation is keeping the hourglass up]."
Can it be resolved? Call ShowCursor(FALSE) before you call SetCursor(), and ShowCursor(TRUE) afterwards. Should do the job.

Hidden Window Display on Users Desktop

We have a VB6 application that uses a non-visible window (form) for DDE communication.
We have some clients reporting that occasionally they can see this window on their desktop.
I did a scan through the code for any visible = true or show's on the form in question, but nothing.
This about all we do with it:
Load frmDDELink
frmDDELink.stuff = stuff
We don't actually explicitly display (or explicitly not display it either).
What could cause a hidden window to be displayed on a user's desktop such that it is visible?
Try and set the location of the form to off-screen.
frmDDELink.ClientLeft = -100
frmDDELink.ClientTop = -100
A misbehaving app on the client's machine could do that. FindWindow() is a notoriously inaccurate API function. On top of that, all VB6 windows have the same class name. Thunder something, iirc. It might be finding your window instead of the one intended, making the wrong window visible.
I like Black Frog's simple hint to set the location off-screen, and nobugz's possible explanation. I would also suggest handling the Form_Activate event and setting the form invisible again.
Private Sub Form_Activate()
'Log something for debugging purposes?'
Me.Visible = False
End Sub
try to set the border into none, or me.visible = false, and set the property not to display in the task bar.

RBSplitView has delayed reload of autosaved view positions

I really enjoy using RBSplitView, an open source replacement for NSSplitView, but I have a problem in my shipping app and am experiencing it again in a new project.
The problem is I'm telling the RBSplitView to autosave its position state by giving it an autosave name. When my app launches the RBSplitView doesn't seem to honor the saved state till a second after the window is drawn.
I've spent the night trying to debug the behavior but have had little success. Anyone out there use this lib and have some advice?
You can scrub this quicktime movie to the issue at work:
http://media.clickablebliss.com/billable/interface_experiments/rbsplitview_delayed_autosave_reload2.mov
I've still been unable to figure out why this is happening but I do have a workaround.
First, make sure your main window is not visible at launch and then at the end of applicationDidFinishLaunching in your app delegate add something like:
[mainWindow performSelector:#selector(makeKeyAndOrderFront:) withObject:self afterDelay: 0.1];
The delay is the key. If you just tell the window to makeKeyAndOrderFront: I still see the issue. However as long as it has a beat of time it looks good.
This likely is happening because the RBSplitView instance needs to wait until it's first moment to get to set its frame to the autosaved value, which happens to be after the user can see it. This 0.0-delay trick simply delays showing the window until the very next runloop, which gives the split view a chance to do its magic (and other views) so that when the user sees the window, it's already nice and sexy. So just do the delay at 0.0 and you'll be fine.
I have a similar, but slightly different workaround in my app that uses RBSplitView. In applicationDidFinishLaunching:, I call adjustSubviews on the split view before calling makeKeyAndOrderFront: on the window that contains it. This seems to knock the split view in to order before it gets displayed on the screen.

Detecting a single mouse click in MFC

In MFC a double-mouse click event triggers the following sequence of messages
WM_LBUTTONDOWN
WM_LBUTTONUP
WM_LBUTTONDBCLK
WM_LBUTTONUP
So responding to the WM_LBUTTONDBCLK message allows you to detect a double-click. But if I just want to detect a single-click how to I distinguish it?
But just looking at the WM_LBUTTONUP message isn't enough as it could be a single-click or it could be the first click of a double-click.
How can I successfully identify just a single-click?
(Please allow me to call these events Mouse Up and Mouse Down. My MFC is a little rusty. And there's this stuff called .NET who's been messing up my terminology lately ;-)
Short story: You don't simply want to know about Mouse Click. You need more.
Long story:
Although this is counter-intuitive, it appears that simply wanting a mouse-click is fairly uncommon. Most often, you'll want to perform some processing on Mouse Down and do some further processing on Mouse Up. The trick is that simply tracking Mouse Up messages is not enough: Mouse Down may not have happened in your window. Do you consider it a valid click then? Especially considering that the Mouse Down processing (such as selecting an item) did not occur.
Going further up the reasoning, you should not rely on receiving a Mouse Up after you processed Mouse Down: User may have moved the mouse and released the button somewhere else (think drag'n'drop), in which case, you don't receive the MouseUp event... unless you capture the mouse on MouseDown to make sure you get mouse event up to Mouse Up even if the mouse left your window.
All in all, you end up tracking Mouse Down, capture the mouse and when you receive Mouse Up, just check if you own the capture. If not, the mouse was either double-clicked (no 2nd mouse down) or Mouse Down happened somewhere else hence you most likely don't care about this Mouse Up.
In conclusion: There's no MouseClick message simply because you wouldn't go very far with it: You need to handle more messages and implement more mechanics anyway.
Oh! And if your dealing with an existing control which already handles all this items and selection stuff, such as a listview, chances are it provides with a similar custom notification such as Item Activate or Item Selection Changed.
I just tried this in Delphi, the behavior is the same: even when a double click is happening, a single click event is issued right after the first one of the two.
I solved it using a timer, which works like this:
deactivate timer on WM_LBUTTONDBLCLK (and set bDbl to true)
activate timer on WM_LBUTTONUP if bDbl==false
deactivate on WM_LBUTTONUP if bDbl==true (and reset bDbl)
I set the interval of the timer to the time returned by GetDoubleClickTime.
MSDN says:
The GetDoubleClickTime function
retrieves the current double-click
time for the mouse. A double-click is
a series of two clicks of the mouse
button, the second occurring within a
specified time after the first. The
double-click time is the maximum
number of milliseconds that may occur
between the first and second click of
a double-click.
If the timer happens to fire then you have the real click. In my case the double click interval is 500ms, so any "real click" will be delayed this long.
You could check WM_LBUTTONDOWN has not been called more than once before WM_LBUTTONUP. In practice Windows does this for you, in that if you get a WM_LBUTTONDBCLK you tend not to get a WM_LBUTTONUP.
You can use PreTranslateMessage() to count the messages as they appear. If you've received only the mouse messages corresponding to a single-click, and the system-configured time for double-clicking has expired, you can safely assume it's a single-click.
As far as I know there is no way to know that this is the case as it is happening, which makes sense -- until the time is expired, there's no way to know that a second click is or isn't coming.
that's a little tricky.
I would detect the WM_LBUTTONDOWN & WM_LBUTTONUP combo, store that event somewhere and set a timeout for a second or so. If there isn't a WM_LBUTTONDBCLK during that timeout then you have a single click.
This might imply you need to have another thread running but I think you could accomplish it with one thread.
I think the solution is to start a timer after the first click & then check the elapsed time after at the next immediate click, this will tell you if it is a single click or double click.
You typically look at #MLButtonUp and you would not have single click and double click behavior on the same mouse button.

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