( Hi, everyone. I'm very new to Windows programming, so I apologize in advance if this has already been asked and I just didn't know what to search for, but this problem has been driving me crazy and I know someone could probably answer this really easily. )
My company has an application that runs as a service in Windows 7. I have been tasked with writing code to change display settings, but I apparently cannot do this from a system service. I created a small executable that changes the color depth to 8bpp in about 5-10 lines of code, but when I place this code in my application, it returns success yet does not actually succeed (nothing changes).
Without a commanding knowledge of how Windows programming works, I have managed to try a MILLION different things to get it to work but with no avail. Can somebody PLEASE help me find what I need to do to make this code function?
On Vista and upwards services run in a different session (session 0) and are isolated from the interactive desktop(s). This means that code that you run from the service is simply unable to make the changes you want. The obvious conclusion is that you need to run code in the interactive desktop.
Now you can do this, but it's not exactly easy to achieve. What you will need to do is arrange for your service to launch an process that runs on the interactive desktop: Launching an interactive process from Windows Service in Windows Vista and later. That process, rather than the service, is what will have to make the changes.
Whilst it is possible to achieve what you want, I think you should regard the difficulties involved as a signal to review whether or not your proposed approach is the best solution to whatever your underlying problem is.
Related
I was wondering if it was even possible with RUBY to watch other applications and if a certain application is below a memory threshold it kills it and starts it again.
Operating System would be Windows 7+
Things I need to be able to do:
Monitor Memory
Determine between different processes
Kill Processes
Start new process (bat script or powershell)
Start monitoring again
The watched application running would run high memory when it is working and that is good. If it goes below 1gb I want this application to kill it. Of course when it restarts it would give a grace period for it to load the RAM.
I was going to use the Shoes gui framework to make something nice to wrap around it. It would be theoretically nice to have some sort of auto detection if the application is running.
If this is possible, but requires Gem you think may help I would like to hear about them.
I found Usagewatch Gem seems to be headed the right way, but from a glance at the documentation it is general and I need to be specific about which process I am watching.
If this question is not appropriate here please let me know via a comment and I will remove it and/or move it to a proper place for this type of question to be asked.
I appreciate your time and effort into helping me with this endeavor.
Thank You
I would suggest using the win32 gem. Than start by looking through the Win32 Api documentation. This will give you the most flexible solution and will give you the whole system programming power for Windows. My advice is to make some wrapper functions about the things connected with Windows you need and use them that way, so if you find a more appriete solution you can switch to it easily.
I am a newbie and not familiar with the setup environments and stuck at some point. I am developing a very simple database application using visual studio 2010. I want to release a demo program and want the demo setup to be executed just one time for a specific computer hardware. For example when one user downloads the demo and installs the setup, the demo setup content, a simple configuration file embedded in the setup or "what so ever I do not know" should be changed, so that setup (when coppied to another computer) could not be used in other computer hardwares.
The sollutions or design ideas for this specific problem should not include any online services checking that the user executes that install or not. All the problem should be solved locally if possible :) and be as generic as possible.
Any design ideas or a starting point
will be very appreciated.
Thanks in advance
This is not possible of course. Whatever breadcrumb you leave to record that the program was ran has to be left on the same machine. Leaving any user with sufficient skills or good enough tools (like SysInternals' ProcMon) to find out where you dropped it and remove it again. Assuming they care enough about making the effort.
The simple solution is to intentionally cripple your demo so that an important feature is missing that would make it useful. Like File + Save. Not just disabled, completely missing in the code as well so hacking the demo program doesn't work either. Easy to do with an #if directive in your source code.
Microsoft's "Windows Installer CleanUp Utility" could be used to help fix broken installations of MSI-installer based products. When the installer failed in some strange way and left corrupt data behind, so bad that even Add/Remove Programs couldn't help, you could often fix things by running this utility and then running the application's installer again.
I just discovered that Microsoft announced a couple weeks ago that they were discontinuing this utility. They didn't merely say "we're not supporting it anymore"; they seemingly removed it from their site entirely.
I have to support a Windows program for a whole bunch of users. Given the number of users, every so often something will go wrong, and this program has been invaluable for me, as a last-ditch line of defense.
I know I could point customers to some third party site that has a cached copy of it, but this seems dangerous (malware potential and such).
So, are there any replacement products? Or, if not, how can I myself do whatever it is that this program did?
To be clear, I'm not asking for help like "how do I programatically modify the registry". I can do that fine. But I need to know what in the registry needs to be modified.
Thanks in advance.
Windows Installer CleanUp utility was never intended to be used in the wild. It was only meant to be used by software developers. If you occasionally have end users needing to use WCU you have some serious installer quality issues that should be addressed.
WCU only removes the Windows Instaleller meta data and doesn't actually uninstall any software. This leaves the machine in a very dirty state. These days with test labs becoming virtualized there's no reason to have this tool anymore. You just roll back to a prior snapshot and keep on working.
I've seen all kinds of online forums full of users who think they know what they are doing ( and don't ) suggest using WCU to solve various problems so in the end Microsoft decided to try to get the horse back in the barn.
I have old copies of WCU archived in my CM system so if you'd like me to generate checksums to help you determine if you are getting a good copy just let me know.
The cleanup utility was a wrapper around the command line utility msizap.exe, described here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370523%28VS.85%29.aspx#1
We're starting a new custom project right now from a client and one of the requirements is the process cannot be terminated unless the system is shutting down, restarting, or logging-off.
This application monitors the USB interface. We will be using WMI to query the device periodically.
The client want's to run the application on Windows XP Operating System and doesn't like installing .NET. So we targeted Visual Basic 6 as our language.
My main concern is this application cannot be terminated. Our Project Adviser talks about Anti-virus and yes, some of the anti virus cannot be terminated. I was thinking how to do the same in Visual Basic 6. I know there will be API involved on the project but where should I go? so API is ok with me.
I saw some articles that converts the EXE to a SERVICE, create Windows Service in Visual Basic 6, etc.
So please .. share your thoughts.
If you want to be evil, you can call the (officially) undocumented RtlSetProcessIsCritical NTDLL function. This will immediately BSOD the machine if your process is terminated.
You cannot create a process that cannot be terminated without some sort of kernel-mode hooking, which involves writing a driver. You might want to look into Rootkits: subverting the Windows kernel if you're interested in that. However, even with kernel-mode hooking there are still numerous ways to terminate processes. The alternative is to use user-mode hooking, easily bypassed but enough for very simple projects.
The solution you want to use will depend on how far you want to go with the termination protection. And even if you do succeed in preventing process termination, there may be ways of preventing your application from working properly - e.g. killing the WMI service.
I think you want to look at writing an NT Service.
More info here: http://www.montgomerysoftware.com/CreatinganNTServiceinVisualBasic6/tabid/161/language/en-US/Default.aspxlink text
It's really frustrating coding in VB6 right now specially I dumped my head in C# for 2 years though I coded in VB6 for 5 years..
Moving back is a pain as if I am starting a new programming language.
To be honest, you are trying to do something in VB6 that it really isn't that great at.
When you say 'cannot be terminated' - what do you mean by that? There are several levels there:
a) App shows a window but the user cannot close it with the X button, or it does not show one
b) App shows no windows or maybe sits in task tray
c) App shows no windows and cannot be shut down from the Applications tab of task manager
d) App cannot be shut down from the process list of task manager
(a) and (b) are probably easiest to do in straight VB. (c) is still possible, but getting uglier. (d) gets you into hack territory and would almost certainly be frownd upon if you did manage it.
If you really need to stop users closing then you can probably hack it to a greater or lesser degree, but the real answer is as the others have said - a system service (this is exactly the srt of thing they were intended for). However that is one thing that VB6 isn't good at so the best solution to your problem is c#.
I am currently trying to make an application portable.
Where are the common places that an application puts its settings in a windows machine?
do you know know of any other places besides
-registry
-Currentuser/Application Data
-app folder
?
After you go over all the places you could think of, try running your app with Process Monitor in the background. Using the right filters, it will show you which registry keys and files have been accessed. And, it will show the exact stack trace of every operation, so you won't have a hard time finding the source of those calls.
Just for completeness - There are a couple of places within the registry (current-user and local-machine).
It depends how the developer stored it.
As sean has said in comment, this also depends on the application framework and windows version. (Thanks sean)