vb.net : change windows "top" of the screen - windows

I have an application (menu bar) that, when running, puts itself at the top of my screen and everything else that loads, automatically knows to load below that menu bar. Its like the program established a new "top" of the screen and that top starts right below the menu bar. I want to duplicate this functionality in vb.net. Does anyone know how to accomplish this?
Basically, I'm looking for something to tell windows the top of the screen starts below my program. I hope that makes sense.
Thanks.

Check out the following project by Arik Poznanski
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/3728/C-does-Shell-Part-3
Take this code, compile, and add it to your project as a reference. Then in the form load
Me.Edge = AppBarEdges.Top 'sets the form to dock at the top of the screen
This sets it to the top of the screen with everything else below.

Related

AHK Cannot ControlClick on hidden elements in nested child window

I'm trying to automate a many clicking process, just to narrow it to the user input.
I encountered problems in controlClicking interface elements, which seems not to be standard Windows GUI elements.
When pointing them with WinSpy they don't appear as separate buttons, but I can point the whole child Window which is drawn in the main program window.
As on pic1, I pointed the whole window and I can find each tab/button by it's text inside and on pic2 I can inspect the ClassNN of that element and it's ID.
As far as clicking other buttons in the main menu bar of the program works, a simple:
ControlClick, ClaTab_01000000H26, WindowName
doesn't work. I think during the day, and many possibilities I tried, I could ControlClick the above button by pointing it with its ID, but that ID changes every instance. I could confirm that tomorrow if it works by ID.
Of course I tried SetControlDelay -1 and ,NN option. But don't take that for granted, I can try any of your suggestions tomorrow.
Both tabs marked with purple color, are to find in the Windows->SiblingWindows tab. I really don't want using x,yCoords (that actually work), but I need the script to be as reliable as possible.
So my questions are:
Am I missing something or you have any suggestions how to click that elements?
Is it correct, that no matter how deep the child windows get (one has buttons to open another on top of it), all the time the WinName stays the same pointing to the main program ***.exe?
Could you provide an example from the web or yours, to find an element's ID by providing the text attached to the button (pic1-red line and also pic2 in "text")?
I also cannot maximize the child window. Double clicking it works, but I can't find the appropriate ClassNN of the window to call.
Could you provide an example, how to use the Messages tab? I assume, if I find the button as on the pictures, I could send a message with controlClick and see if there's a reaction?
1.Ugh. I found the solution, which is awesome, but a little frustrating that with a bit of luck I tried another aproach that's not that logical for a newbie like me:
instead:
ControlClick, ClaTab_01000000H6, ahk_class ClaWin01000000H_2,,,, NA
it's just
ControlFocus, ClaTab_01000000H6, ahk_class ClaWin01000000H_2,,,, NA
2._Yep. One child window creates another and another and another, but winTitle stays the same. In my case:
ahk_class ClaWin01000000H_2
3._Code below returns the handle/ID of the element you specify. Change ClaTab and ClaWin to your chouice.
ControlGet, OutputVar, hwnd,, ClaTab_01000000H1, ahk_class ClaWin01000000H_2
MsgBox, %OutputVar%`
Probably to be continued.
I highly recomend to both use
WinSpy https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=28220
SimpleSpy https://www.the-automator.com/downloads/simple-spy/
First one has lots of useful information and the window tab provides information of hidden buttons/windows. Second one in a more clear way indicates the parent window and its class.

MFC: how to show a welcome dialog first?

When launch the program, I want to show a welcome dialog first before showing the main window. My current approach is like below.
BOOL CMyApp::InitInstance()
{
...
// The one and only window has been initialized, so show and update it
m_pMainWnd->ShowWindow(SW_HIDE);
//m_pMainWnd->UpdateWindow();
// call DragAcceptFiles only if there's a suffix
// In an SDI app, this should occur after ProcessShellCommand
CWelcomeDialog welcome_dialog;
welcome_dialog.DoModal();
m_pMainWnd->ShowWindow(SW_SHOW);
m_pMainWnd->UpdateWindow();
return TRUE;
}
Towards the end of InitInstance(), originally it uses (SW_SHOW). At first, I try commenting it out but it still shows. So I change to (SW_HIDE). It works but has unpleasant visual artifacts. Is there way to stop showing the main window as early as possible?
Another issue is that when I hide main window and show the dialog, the dialog is not in the center position of the main window.
In general, how to implement a welcome dialog and to show it well-centered before anything else?

Messagebox centered to parent Window / Form

I am trying to build my own HTA right now to act as a front end for some of my batch scripts. I would like to use a msgbox (or anything equivalent) that I can use to output any errors, clicking Ok will just get rid of the prompt.
Here is the code I have been using:
x=msgbox("Error text" ,48, "Error: Title")
I would preferably like the following conditions, to be able to use a custom icon, the box to center on X and Y to the parent window/form, and to allow me to define the text in the box and it's title.
If this is not possible then just a messagebox that can be centered on X and Y to the parent window would suffice.
Is there any way of doing this in VBScript?
Or should I look into doing an HTML/CSS version that would popup on the screen?
I don't know the answer to your first question, but whatever the answer is there must be necessarily limits to what a box message box that pops up outside of the HTML can do.
So for customization that includes icon, centering and anything else expressible in HTML/CSS, I think you should do HTML/CSS that pops up on the screen.
You might want to look at jqueryui or bootstrap to get you going faster so you don't have to start from scratch.
https://jqueryui.com/dialog/#modal-message
http://getbootstrap.com/javascript/#modals
They both use jquery underneath so if you aren't already using it, you'll pick up some more bytes in your initial download.

Get Context Menu text of specific TaskBar button

I've got some code that grabs the TaskBar buttons and their text from the windows TaskBar using User32.SendMessage with the TB_GETBUTTON message to retrieve a TBBUTTON structure (Win32 API via C# P/Invokes). But I'm trying to figure out how to then, once I have the handle to the button, grab the associated context menu text. There is some status information on there for a specific application that I would like to retrieve. The button text gets me some of it, but I need to the context menu text to complete it.
Any ideas?
This is not completely clear... Context menus don't have text, as such - they have menu items, each one of which will have text. By "context menu text", do you mean the text of the menu items in the taskbar button's popup/context menu? For example, "Restore", "Minimize" etc in the screenshot below?
If so, I suspect you're going about this the wrong way:
This menu doesn't belong to the button, but is the system menu of the window represented by the taskbar button. If the button has a context menu, this is probably for a grouped collection of windows, not one specific window (or even windows for one process.)
Making judgements based on the context menu of a window sounds like a dodgy approach to me, especially based on text since that will change depending on where in the world your user is located. Applications can also change the contents of this menu so there's no guarantee it will contain something you expect to be there. It would be better to check the window style, if it's minimized, etc, to find out the information that also affects the contents of the menu.
I'm going to answer this based on what your needs seem to be from the question, not what you've directly asked, since (a) it's not possible as asked and (b) I think you're trying to do something else. (As a general guideline, in a question it's good to state why you're trying to do something - and even maybe ask about that, ie 'how do I achieve X' - in case there's a better method than the one you're using. Here, X is probably 'find out information about this window' not 'get the text of the context menu', because that's probably only one possible method to get to X.) Also I think extracting data from the internals of a third-party application like Explorer (the taskbar is an Explorer window) is fragile and prone to break in future versions of Windows.
The system menu or window information (whichever one) belongs to application windows. Unless taskbar buttons are grouped (and then it's the subitems) one taskbar button corresponds to one specific window in the system. So what you want to do is find these windows. You do this by:
Using the EnumWindows function
Then for each window that is passed to the callback, checking the extended window style using GetWindowLong with GWL_EXSTYLE to see if the WS_EX_APPWINDOW bit is set
In addition, sometimes other windows are shown: these heuristics should help.
Each one of these windows is a window that should appear on the taskbar, Alt-Tab dialog, etc.
You say you're getting the text of the taskbar button - this is probably the window caption of the window, and GetWindowText is the canonical (read: probably a lot more reliable) way to get the caption of a window belonging to another process.
If you really want the popup menu, then:
Use GetSystemMenu to retrieve the handle for the system menu for the window. Applications can customise this, so if your app is doing this (and that's why you want the popup menu) ensure you pass false to the bRevert parameter
You can then get the number of menu items using GetMenuItemCount and for each one call GetMenuItemInfo to get info about each menu item. Pass true to the fByPosition parameter to indicate you're accessing the menus by position (since you know the count, you're getting item 0, 1, 2... count-1).
This fills a MENUITEMINFO structure, which (I think, I haven't ever had to code this so I haven't tested) will tell you the text associated with an item via the dwTypeData field "if the MIIM_STRING flag is set in the fMask member".
If you really want information about the window status, you can get this information using methods like IsIconic to see if it's minimized, GetWindowLong again to get other information, etc. I'd suggest you ask another SO question about how to get whatever specific information about a window for details.
Hope that helps!

Hide window until the top window is displayed

I am facing a little annoying design problem. Not easy to give a title of my question.
I must display two windows, one over another one. The first one is a Cocoa window, the second is made with Qt. In the second window, an action is performed, but the user can choose to close this window. He must fall back on the first window.
To display my first window, which is actually a SFAuthorizationPluginView, I do:
[myview displayView];
then, to display the window made with Qt on top of first window:
QWidget* w = openMyScreen();
NSView* v = (NSView*)w->winId();
[[v window] setLevel:2003];
This works well, however there is a small delay before the second window is displayed. We can thus see for a very short time the first window.
I need that the second window stays on top of the first window, because the user can close the second window and must have access to the first window.
Any ideas on a trick how to hide the first window, just the time, the second window appears?
Thanks in advance
NSDisableScreenUpdates and NSEnableScreenUpdates (link) might be useful in this situation. The documentation says:
You typically call this function so that operations on multiple windows appear atomic to the user.
which seems to describe your situation.
A word of unrelated advice though: Don't go setting window levels willy-nilly. A window level of 2003 will likely cause the window to appear over things like the dock or even the menu bar, which would definitely be strange. You should stick to the standard levels declared in NSWindow.h unless you have good reason. NSFloatingWindowLevel might be appropriate (although I'm not sure what level the SFAuthorizationPluginView window is displayed at).
Starting with MacOS 10.4, you can use :
[NSWindow disableScreenUpdatesUntilFlush];

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