Suppose you have a process which run as as service as the System Account, is it possible to view the content of the windows created by the processes created by the service.
Suppose for example, that you have a service running as a kind of wrapper which starts Excel.
Microsoft Spy++
Select Spy/Processes and find your process there
If some of it's threads had created any windows, you'll see them as subtrees.
A process that creates and fills windows should never be run as a service. That being said, if this is on Win2K3 or earlier set the service to interact with the desktop and you can see the contents yourself. If it is on Vista or later there is no way to examine the contents of an arbitrary window.
If it is a specific type of window (i.e. EDIT control) that supports retrieving its contents you may be able to run another service that sends a windows message to the first service to get what you want.
Services will (under normal circumstances) be associated with a different window station to the interactive desktop, and they cannot interact -- you can read up more on Window Stations on MSDN
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I am building one desktop application using electron js + Node Js. This will be an desktop usages monitoring application.
My target is to list down all the open applications names and their process IDs if possible which are having user interface. e.g. Notepad, MS Office applications, Visual studio etc.
Ultimately I need to control which applications can be opened on the desktop and which can be blocked from usages. I can not have a list of all the applications in the world and then check those one by one via process list. So as a work around, If I get the list of all the open applications with UI associated with it, I can at least show the user if this application is allowed to use or not.
Platform I am using is Unix/Windows/MacOS.
If there is no straight forward solution to it, can we think of something like using OpenCV and understand image by some algo to check the open application windows? Because any way I am interested to find the application on the top of all i.e. active.
Is there any way to identify such processes/applications?
I understand that desktop/GUI apps are not supported in Windows containers. They do run but there's no built-in way to interact with them. I had the following idea - maybe I could use the Desktop Sharing API (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/_rdp/) for this purpose, the idea is to run a desktop app, then run a sharing program that uses the Desktop Sharing API, and connect to it using a Desktop Sharing API viewing program from the host.
I had to do some recap about window stations and desktops, and I noticed that when starting the container with cmd in interactive mode, I'm logged with ContainerAdministrator as a service (logon type 5). I tried running some WinAPI functions that deal with desktops and winstation and got some access denied results, so I switched to running cmd as system.
The window station of the cmd process (and other child processes) is not the interactive WinSta0, but instead some other service window station, which makes sense since I'm logged on as a service, and I figured that I can't use this window station, so I used a little program I wrote to run notepad in Winsta0 in the Default desktop. Afterwards I ran another program that enumerates the windows on WinSta0\Default, and the notepad window does get enumerated and I also get it's title, so it's running somewhere.
So now I tried running the desktop sharing API program (also on WinSta0\Default). It runs and I can connect from the host, but I only get a black screen without anything on it. I also tried running a program that takes a screenshot of the windows but I get an empty bitmap.
So I thought maybe the Default desktop is not the active desktop, and by using the OpenInputDesktop function I could confirm it - the current desktop was the Winlogon desktop, so I used the SwitchDesktop function to switch to the Default desktop (I used OpenInputDesktop again to verify that it actually worked).
Unfortunately, this didn't change anything, I still get an empty screen and empty bitmaps.
I know that containers are built for micro services and are not supposed to run GUI apps and so, but still - is there a way to make this work? Or any ideas of what else I can check? Alternatively, if you know that it can't work - I would also be happy to hear a good technical explanation of why it doesn't work.
I am facing the below issue while working on BluePrism, the issue relates to spying elements from a windows application called "Cashier", the application is written in VB, I provided the .exe file for it and the application launched properly, however, I can't properly spy the individual rows in the table shown in the attached picture. I can only spy the box as a whole, and no information is retrieved.
possible the application spawns the elements in a new process? perhaps check the task manager once and make sure another process hasn't spawned to show the results in?
I have an application that uses COM to automate Word. It needs to run even when a user is not logged in. I achieved this on Windows 7 by making it run as a scheduled task which runs at startup and doesn't require a user to be logged on. I also had to use the 'hack' where you add a 'Desktop' folder in 'C:/Windows/SysWow64/config/systemprofile'.
I tried this same method in Windows Server 2012, but it doesn't work. I can see in the task scheduler that the application is starting an instance of Word. However, it then appears to 'hang' and nothing happens. I think perhaps the invisible instance of Word is showing an error message which causes the whole thing to hang, as I cannot dismiss the message.
Has anyone else had trouble getting COM to work on windows server? Is there any way of showing hidden instances of Word to see if an error dialog is showing? Or any other way of diagnosing what the problem is?
I know ideally we would have an app that created the word documents without using COM, but this is not an option at the moment.
Does your app work when run as a logged-in user?
In the past I've run into what sound like similar problems, when running programs that try to use COM interfaces; some tasks work, but others simply don't function unless run as a logged-in user with an interactive desktop.
For me the simplest solution was to set up the machine to log in as a user at boot (which you can set up in the control panel - or I think there might also be a sysinternals tool that supports configuring that nowadays), then make sure that task scheduler/Jenkins/whatever you use launches the app as the logged-in user.
Ok, this is a tricky one. I'm trying to set up a Selenium Grid 2 with some Windows 7 VMs to run Webdriver tests. To automatize the whole process I use some ant script that connects to the VMs through ssh to start/stop/reconfigure the nodes.
Everything works great, the nodes can register with the hub host and execute the test. Only problem is that I don't see any browser window during the test run. I can see the process and I see the test log being executed, but there is no graphical interface.
On the other hand, if I start the node manually through Windows, everything is normal.
I suppose the problem is that processes executed under cygwin cannot start Windows displays, but in that case, shouldn't throw an error? The other option I'm thinking is that Webdriver is using HTMLunit as a fallback, but then... why do I see the firefox process as long as the test lasts and consuming CPU and memory?
Through ssh, you only exchange with Windows stdin, stdout and stderr streams. The ssh connection is tunneling those streams and nothing else. You don't see Windows Desktop interface, but the Desktop object exists on the Windows machine, the programs (here the browsers) are connected to it, and all GUI interactions are live in there.
If the GUI doesn't require any user interaction, everything is fine that way. The dialog boxes are created, the program runs, once it finishes, the dialog boxes are destroyed by the application and the application closes. Nothing is blocking in terms of GUI our application.
If you program requires an user action in the created yet invisible dialog boxes, your program will be there waiting for your interaction to move forward. You will see the process in the task manager, doing nothing but waiting. As you don't have access to the Windows Desktop where the dialog boxes are created and virtually 'displayed', the program seems to hang.
A typical case 2 is if you remote run a program waiting for a user to do something, say notepad. You can launch notepad, it will be spawned and then it will wait for you to type some text or close it.
With your Selenium tests, you are in case 1: all the browsers' interactions needed to make the GUI working are actually done by Selenium server that does the navigation clicks and the program exit for you. Their GUI actually are living by browsing through your test web servers, you just don't see it.
Some further readings from Microsoft website on Desktops and Desktop Creation.
If you want to see the tests and have valid screenshots, you need to have a user logged in and those tests need to run as that user. Everything must run through that single desktop session, so you cannot use RDP to remotely connect to the machine. Your best bet is to use VNC, since that will connect to an already established session.