I can see a similar question that has been answered here (How would i play a specific song in iTunes through java?) but it doesn't really answer my question (I don't think, anyway).
I have a couple of buttons on a winform (play, pause, skip forward, skip back) and want to be able to connect these through iTunes, so as to create a 'mini media player'.
However, I am having issues (obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this :P) with all this 'COM' malarkey. I have tried including (nearly) all the possible references from 'Apple', 'iTunes' and still can't seem to be able to find a way of pressing the button 'play' and actually playing a song in iTunes.
I have a button on click event (i've called the button btnPlay). But does anyone know the 'correct' or 'efficient' way of connecting iTunes to winforms?
I've heard about something called sendKeys, but I'm a total noob and have really no idea of how to create this sort of thing.
PS. I've also tried to find a refence for using iTunesLib; (from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/noahc/archive/2006/07/06/automating-itunes-with-c-in-net.aspx) but this is a dated post, and i'm not certain this namespace is available anymore (well, I can't find it anywhere in the Com references anyway.
As always, any help much appreciated.
Add a reference to iTunes 1.xx Type Library (it will be in the COM list of references).
Then you can use iTunes app as so in your click event
iTunesApp app = new iTunesAppClass();
app.Play();
you will need to perform the following step to embed the the COM iTunes app.
Go to the Solution Explorer.
Right click on References –> iTunesLib and hit Properties.
Set “Embed Interop Types” to False.
Related
I want to detect when my touchpad is clicked!
I normally use a usb mouse, so I don't use the touchpad for anything. Instead I'd like to make it possible to perform an action in .NET, when the touchpad is clicked. This way I can use it as a shortcut: One tap and something cool happens.
Is this possible, and if yes, any clue how? I'd prefer if it could be working in VB.NET or C#.
My theory is that I'd have to make a mousehook, which then somehow determines which device the click is coming from. If the click is determined to be from the touchpad, then cancel the click and doWhatever().
Thanks!
* EDIT *
Well, it's "solved", sort of :) In a odd coincidence, Synaptics released their latest driver and software for their touchpads a few days ago with some new functionality. As my laptop has a synaptics touchpad, I tried out the software and interestingly enough, the functionality for designating clicks on the trackpad to perform an action, was built-in.
So the desired function has been achieved, without a line of code (my own code anyway :).
Answer goes to Adrian though for the link to the RawInputSharp library. I tinkered with it yesterday, and I'm 90% sure it would be possible to use for this purpose, in the event a laptop doesn't have a synaptics trackpad.
Have a look at the RawInputSharp library from this page. It uses pInvokes into User32.dll to get hold of input device information. Using it you can detect which device (ie. mouse) input is coming from.
Having had a little play with it, I managed to extract some code that displays just the device id - a different value depending on whether I use my USB mouse or my internal touchpad. The tricky thing would be to identify which device id is that of your touchpad automatically, but you could manually configure this in your application.
trying to write a program to flag a Key_up or Key_down event throughout the system, but I'm having a hard time with the implementation. I've seen a few posts on here that link to outdated articles on Global Hooks, but they are usually so old I cant get source code working, or theres really no explination of how it works.
I'm looking for some sort of implementation that's relitively simple (ie a library or DLL I can use, or if it's implemented by Visual Studio 2010 somewhere) as opposed to having several classes and files devoted to making a global hook.
The use of my code: I essentially want to extend the CTRL+C function to detect if CTRL is pressed, and if C and 1 are pressed (CTRL+C+1) I copy, but also store the copied text onto a notepad document.
So with that in mind it seems really extensive to design all this code only to hook onto the KeyDown/KeyUp that will be used for only 1 key
if this question has been answered recently please link me and I can close/edit this to not be redundant
OK, so almost immediately after posting this I found the sollution by re-wording my search :/ sorry to be 'that guy' everyone. BUT in the spirite of helpfulness here is a link to a SUPER quick way to get global hotkeys in your application:
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/180436-global-hotkeys/
this works for both creating new hotkeys and overriding old ones
i want to write an application, which reads under windows xp the quick launch items in the order like they are located in the taskbar,
and sets hotkeys for each of these item.
windows + 1 should start the first application
windows + 2 the second, etc.
(like in windows 7)
all of these items are found i a folder, but if i read the items of this folder, i dont get the right order of these items.
i found two solutions the get the right order - first:
in the registry an entry is found, where its saved how they are located, but not in plain text. i dont know how to read this, and cant reverse engine it.
the second:
read via winapi the items tooltip from the taskbar, so i can (if there are not items with the same name) search via the name in the quick launch folder.
the quick launch bar is just a listview (syslistview32).
via sendmessage i got it work to count the items, and start one (faking a click on this item), but how the hell can i read the tooltip?
i have googled a lot, tried everything, but i didnt get it run.
i hope you have any snippets for me, to solve this problem.
cheers
Determining the order of the items in the Quick Launch toolbar programmatically is going to be inherently fragile. There's not an API exposed for this, which means that it's subject to change in future versions of Windows, breaking your code that relied on assumptions about undocumented implementation details.
However, this is less of a problem in this specific case than it normally would be, since the Quick Launch toolbar doesn't exist anymore (or, at least, no one uses it anymore). The last version of Windows that used the Quick Launch toolbar was Vista, so if you make sure that your code is compatible with Vista and earlier, you should be fine. It won't work with newer versions anyway.
The positions of items in the Quick Launch toolbar is stored in the Registry in the following key:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop
You can extract the information from there, parse and interpret it, and then use it as you like. As you mention, this information isn't stored in plain text form because that would be very slow for the shell to load and parse itself. Since this is undocumented and not designed to be used by clients, they had no particular benefit in making it user (or developer) friendly. All that matters is what's most efficient for the shell, and storing the binary information from its internal structures is the obvious choice.
You will need to reverse engineer this in order for it to be useful to you. The way I'd go about it is probably by setting up a test environment with a couple of items in the Quick Launch bar in a particular order, exporting the information from the Registry, moving one of the items around, exporting the updated information from the Registry, and comparing the two exported Registry files to see what changed. Rinse and repeat as many times as necessary to deduce the pattern. (Really makes you wonder why so many developers actually do take the time to reverse-engineer undocumented aspects of Windows, doesn't it?)
The other option would be to use Spy++ to investigate the windows that implement the taskbar and its Quick Launch toolbar. I don't have a pre-Windows 7 system around, but it sounds like from the question that you've already done this and determined that the Quick Launch toolbar is implemented using a standard ListView. If you know the name of that window (and the names of its ancestor windows), you can walk through those windows to obtain a handle to the window you're interested in. And then you can determine the order of the items in the window as if it were a standard ListView in your own application.
The documentation for ListView controls is here; that should get you started in the right direction. You can get the text of one of the subitems by sending the LVM_GETITEMTEXT message.
This is probably the easier way of doing it. The same caveats apply--there is nothing keeping future versions of Windows from changing the names of those windows or the way that the taskbar is implemented, but since the only versions of Windows that have a Quick Launch toolbar have already been released (and therefore aren't likely to change), this may not be a big problem.
Then again, with the fact of the Quick Launch toolbar's obsolescence in mind, I struggle to comprehend why this endeavor is even worthy of investing developer time.
Also, even once you get this program all written and installed, consider what happens when the user adds a new item to the Quick Launch toolbar or re-arranges the existing items. How is your utility going to know that and adjust the keyboard shortcuts accordingly? What if an installer adds/removes an item from the Quick Launch toolbar?
We are looking into the possibility of allowing users to opt into a program where they report what button clicks etc. they do, and I was wondering if anyone can suggest a good library which already does this. Based on the way the app is implemented, we have access to the base "Button" class and can add code on the click which records the fact that the button was clicked.
What we're looking for is a library which can record all these clicks, store them locally, and then send them to us at some point in the future when the user has internet access.
Does something like this exist in an open or closed form?
Thanks,
Liron
Our app can run code in either c# or javascript, since it runs in Unity3d, but we have other desktop apps which are pure c# and would prefer a library we can run across all our applications.
We ended up going with DeskMetrics, which seemed like a good fit for our needs. We also looked at TrackerBird which has some nice features which weren't necessary for our particular requirement and wasn't working within the limited requirements of Unity3d.
I just wanted to know, if there is someway to make a program (or part of a program) intangable with c#. I want to make it so that people can see the program is there, but if they were to click, it would click whatever is underneath it. I would also like to know if you can do that backwords. Is there someway to make an item that is invisable, clickable?
Thank you for your help!
To your vague question, I offer a vague response:
Sounds like your option one is possible. You would need to send the click event (message) that you receive to the appropriate window (the one underneath yours). I suspect that you would have to DllImport some stuff to do this from c#.
Your option two, while more difficult, is probably also possible because you can inject code into other running executables. This will be a privileged operation, and you will likely again have to use stuff from non .NET dlls to do it from c#. See Three Ways to Inject Your Code into Another Process on CodeProject.
If you want to display something to a user without it getting in the way of whatever it was they were doing at the time you could pop up your messages in bubble from the task bar perhaps?
The answer to this question covers this. Or if you're lazy here's the code project link.
Ok so it sometimes might be necessary to show something on screen and not let it be clickable (like On-Screen-Display for video playback to show volume increase, etc..)
Here's an example of how to this in C# - from codeproject: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/OSDwindow.aspx
This uses the Win32 API ShowWindow(hWnd, SW_SHOWNOACTIVATE) to present the window without losing focus (can't be selected).
And here's the MSDN page for this call ShowWindow
To display a window that is invisible but clickable you can use a window with no border (FormBorderStyle=None) and set transparency to 1%.
Hope that helps!