I need to develop a print driver to print from any application into a TIFF file. Does someone know of resources or a good SDK vendor that would enable me to do that? Environment is Windows, any language.
The Microsoft Windows Driver Kit (freely available from the linked Microsoft site) has extensive documentation and examples on writing printer drivers. You can check the online printer driver page of the DDK docs before downloading it.
Edit: One commercial alternative that would probably be much quicker to deploy is VeryPDF's DocumentPrinter. It's rather pricy (currently $1500 for a developer license, $399 for a server license), but from what I've heard their support is rather good so if the price is tenable for you this may be a good option.
There's also a SDK from DirectConvert, but I couldn't find any pricing info and don't know anything about them.
Depending on your usage patterns, another option would be something like TechSmith SnagIt, which has printer capture facilities available. This is not a SDK, though.
Create a raster print driver using the Windows DDK. The sample they provide will do just fine. This will generate bitmaps, which can then be converted to TIFF using LibTiff. Your OEMSendPage function is where you'll want to convert the bitmap to TIFF and save it. If you're unfamiliar with the DDK and Windows print drivers, expect to spend quite a bit of time on this.
I have source for a driver I used to sell that does exactly what you want, but I stopped maintaining it after NT 4 so it's seriously out of date and would require some significant work to make it useful on modern Windows platforms.
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I'm trying to find a good GUI library I could use to create a program on the computer that connects to a microcontroller by USB. I've never done any GUI work before but I have done a lot of webpage design/tools. We are going to program the microcontroller with C but I don't think the GUI will need to be C. It needs to work on Windows, so probably compile on Windows too. I've also never done any USB transmission but I'm hoping to take it one step at a time.
Right now I'm looking at using GTK but it needs a bunch of other things to download with it. I'm also going to look at QT and someone else suggested making a Windows Forms Application. There's a lot of options out there so I'm having trouble figuring it out.
As for my requirement, it just needs to be a very simple GUI that has a few control buttons, a display area (info from microcontroller), a notification area (basically error messages go here), and maybe a graph. I've included a prototype GUI help give you an idea of what I'm doing.
Edit: It needs to run and compile on Windows. We don't really have a budget for it, free open source is preferred. I don't need something elaborate and fancy, I just want to get it done as fast as possible.
We are using a TTL-232R cable, UART interface. I know nothing about USB transmission, school has crushed me.
From what you've specified, I would set base-camp up at Java.
Java in Eclipse to write the code.
Java Swing libraries (helped by the WindowBuilder plugin for Eclipse) to "draw" the GUI. It is very easy to create "Windowsy" GUIs using these.
JFreeGraph libaries to allow you to create graphs very easily, again from within Eclipse.
RXTX library for "virtual COM port" serial communication within Java (it doesn't sound like you're using proper USB, but just RS232 with a USB adapter).
Your created GUI would run on any machine with Java installed, which is not a big ask for the end user. You can even create a Windows executable/installer from the resulting Java files if you wanted it to be a (apparently) native Windows application.
And - bonus - all the tools mentioned are free as a bird.
It will kind of depend on what kind of compiler, IDE, etc you will settle on. If you are going to windows cold, and
money is an issue, then open source is always a good thing to look at. I have enjoyed using eclipse and Code::Blocks IDEs. For C/C++, I use minGW. In terms of GUI plug-ins, HERE are some conversation with GUI recommendations specifically for use with Code::Blocks.
If money is not an issue, I have use National Instruments LabWindows/CVI full dev kit forever. It is one of the easiest ANSI C compilers/IDE I have ever used. It is only ANSI C, but has extensions to make using instrumentation easy. I have written a little USB stuff (not much), sockets, instrumentation, and many GUI apps.
Please comment what tools you currently prefer, I may have other suggestions.
Lazarus CodeTyphon has cross platform native compiler with GUI working on every supported platform. It supports 8 OS-CPU host layers (Win32, Win64, Linux32, Linux64, FreeBSD32, FreeBSD64, Solaris32 and Solaris64), and 25+ OS-CPU target layers. It also incorporates many graphical widgets and SCADA like behaviour with PascalSCADA and other components. There are wrappers for LibUSB.
I would use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop the GUI. They offer a free version called Express. I would use the C# language but MSVS supports other languages as well so just choose whichever you're most comfortable with. The best thing about MSVS is that there are millions of developers out there, which means that you will be able to search for and find lots of examples for how to use an RS-232 COM port or USB interface. I'm guessing that you'll be able to find GUI objects for graphing and other objects as well. (The basic stuff like buttons and edit boxes is all built into MSVS.)
BTW, you need to sort out whether you're using an RS-232 COM port or a USB interface. They're both serial interfaces but they're not the same thing. Either could work.
There was a smbmrx sample code using RDBSS in WDK Vista.
But since WDK 7600 has been released, the sample was removed. -Do you know why?
I'm finding a nice sample code to learn RDBSS.
Is there a good open source better than smbmrx sample?
It was probably removed because it was getting long in the tooth. It was never the full SMB redirector implementation shipped with Windows, it was some subset of the original version. It also uses TDI which is being deprecated in newer Windows in favor of WSK.
I don't know of any good open source examples. A network redirector is a complicated piece of software to write and there's value there for anyone brave enough to go for it. Why do you need this?
-scott
I would like to build a graphical application that must work on at least Windows, Linux and MacOS. I would like to know what do you suggest I should use.
I have some experience with Java and C++ but I thought about using Java Swing first. What do you think or further suggest (like maybe tools or frameworks)? I also may be needing to connect to a PostgreSQL database to store data.
Java is probably the simplest way to get your application working on all 3 platforms as well as to add database support. All of these are equally possible in C++, but it definitely involves more work because you need to learn to use a cross-platform widget toolkit. Also, C++ database drivers usually have wildly varying designs but Java presents a unified interface via JDBC - this also means that you can change your underlying DB at any time without having to change your code.
I would use the Qt platform from Nokia. It supports all the OSes that you've mentioned and has also database connectors for PostgreSQL but also for MySQL, SQLite, etc.
It also has a very nice IDE, the QT Creator that you can use should you pick Qt.
I would suggest Qt too. Qt has seen very good development recently, their examples and documentation base is quite large, and the LGPL license is flexible too, for creating proprietary software. It has a good Qt Creator IDE, a Qt GUI Designer. Plus is has quite a number of modules, enabling it to be used in conjunction with other language developed apps/libraries. And, it is used in commercial/public apps like Google Earth, Skype (maybe only the linux version). So, it has a good history of reliability. And yeah, for Database, it has modules, like Qt-Sql. Another advantage you get over java is speed.
wxWidgets does cross-platform easily enough, using available native toolkits. You could probably use a ORM for the database part, but I don't have enough experience using them under C++ to provide an actual informed opinion there.
GTK is cross-platform. Pidgin uses it and manages to get away with being generally considered a fully-cross-platform app. The installer size is a problem, though.
What GUI toolkit does Valve use for Steam? Is it Qt? I am interested in using the same toolkit for a project.
According to Valve itself:
"VGUI is Valve's proprietary Graphical User Interface. All Source and Steam applications use VGUI to draw windows, dialogs and menus. It also handles localization: the displaying of text in the user's preferred language. "
That's interesting, maybe if you guys do some research you can have it working in your programming language. I'll download the SDK to see if I can make it work with Java :)
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VGUI_Documentation
Having had experience with the Source engine I know that Valve have an library called VGUI which they use for all their games and many of their tools (when in game the library sits on top of the Source renderer, when in tools it sits on top of the Windows API I believe). Although I can’t answer the question with 100% certainty I suspect that this is what they use for Steam as well (I seem to recall some Steam updates that mentioned VGUI) – I would be surprised if the new beta uses a different library.
Even if it is not using VGUI, given what I know of Valve I would think they will have written something else entirely in-house.
So, it is (almost certainly) proprietary and highly unlikely to ever be available for third party use (unless you have the funds to buy a Source engine license).
Steam only runs on Windows and predates QT for Windows, so I'd have to guess something else.
Since Steam has had the same GUI since 2003, chances are it uses some variant of MFC. It also uses an embedded Internet Explorer web browser for its Store and Community sections.
However, I can't give any guarantees about what the version currently in Beta uses. It looks quite a bit different and includs the Webkit rendering engine instead of using IE. It may use Webkit for everything rather than drawing their own GUIs.
Does this answer the question?
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/02/25/0640233/Steam-UI-Update-Beta-Drops-IE-Rendering-For-WebKit
I need to create a driver that presents itself to Windows as a video capture driver. The driver generates the video itself. How would I go about doing this? And please keep in mind that I'm using Visual C++ Express.
See this :
Virtual WebCam Driver
I'm not sure you can do this with a UMD, so you'll likely need to install the WDK. You probably all ready know this, but writing a driver is a huge undertaking so you should be prepared for that.
Here's a link on writing Windows drivers from MSDN. I'd also suggest you pick up a copy of the Windows Internals book, and check out OSR (and take a class if you can!).
Hope that helps you get started!