I'm using the Kitware VTK library to display 2D images. I've recently begun work using the vtkWindowToImageFilter to output images in various formats. Everything was looking great until I worked at home today and I began to realize that VTK rendering doesn't seem to work when you are running software on your work machine through Remote Desktop.
When I output an image while NOT running in Remote Desktop, the image that gets output only consists of the VTK window. But when I run this same process while using Remote Desktop, the output image comes out in the correct size, but does just a normal screenshot basically, and other UI elements outside of the VTK window are showing up.
Question:
What is it about Remote Desktop and VTK that causes the differences I'm seeing? Is there anything that can be done to support outputting images from VTK windows while using Remote Desktop?
Thanks in advance!
From the VTK mailing list, I received the following response:
Remote desktop swap the video card driver hence the issue you are seeing. But if you use VNC instead, you should be good.
Hope this helps someone make the decision I had to make: whether or not to go forward with development on this feature knowing that if used remotely, the results would be unusable. I decided to go ahead with development with the assumption that our users who are in the phase of their workflow where this feature will be used are normally going to be in the office sitting in front of their work machines.
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I've received an interesting requirement for my Selenium tests where I need my code to RDP into a server, open up a browser and then run my tests on that.
Initially I thought Browserstack or even Selenium Grid, but the requirement is to actually open the RDP session and run tests through that.
Is there a way to achieve this? I wanted to try using something like Microsoft UI Automation to open the RDP session but then my Selenium tests would just run locally after starting up RDP, right? I'm having some trouble getting starting on this and can't seem to find a good place to start.
The RDP window is basically an image of a desktop and Selenium cannot control the web browser through it. You would need to deploy your Selenium tests on the remote machine and run them from there.
This is theoretically possible, but not exactly in the way you are describing it. You seem to be saying that you want to interact with things inside an RDP windows as if the RDP window were a standard browser or native app, and things inside it were elements in a DOM. By running selenium on a host machine, and then opening up an RDP, and clicking within the RDP window from the original host machine.
It is impossible to connect like this (in a manner that this approach would require) directly over an RDP. If for no other reason than security. For example; if you have ever watched people on youtube infect VM's with crazy viruses to show off the destructive effect of the virus on a VM without hurting the computer they are RDP'ed into from. But there seem to be ways to communicate over TCP connections via RDP, which would facilitate other ways to interact with the remote machine.
Additionally, you could just SSH/Enter-PSSession into the machine, and set up a communication channel between the machines outside of the RDP session. If you had a custom built application on the machine being remoted into, you could use System32 libraries to tell the primary machine x y coordinates of things to click on. Then, from the primary machine, you can maximize the RDP window, and click on the provided X Y coordinates.
I suspect that this would successfully send the click all the way through down to the VM, in the manner you are suggesting. If Appium cannot send the click down in this manner, you may need to develop your own abstraction of the user32.dll to perform clicks using the core Windows logic for keyboards and mouse clicks.
All in all, this is an INSANELY in depth project that accomplishes (seemingly) nothing for the effort. I would push back on whomever is giving you this requirement, by investigating some of the things I mentioned above (along with any other advice), and explaining the cost versus the return on investment.
Hopefully, they will just let you use Selenium Grid to communicate with VM's or attached devices to push out applications and test them given industry standard approaches.
Here is an interesting and relevant read: https://superuser.com/questions/130552/tunneling-a-tcp-ip-connection-through-remote-desktop-connection
After updating windows to version 1803 none of the WPF applications on a laptop (Intel hd 500 GPU) work properly anymore (start with a blank window or don't show the GUI at all). I've made a simple test app that only shows one button and it results in an empty window. If I turn off the hardware rendering (according to Software rendering mode - WPF), the application works as expected.
I've tried several versions of the GPU driver including the generic MS one, latest one, latest one recommended by the laptop manufacturer, older ones but all with the same result. The recovery point to the previous version is not available anymore.
The laptop is barely running existing applications so setting the registry not to use the hardware rendering for all the .net applications is not an option due to performance degradation.
Has anyone experienced anything similar, are any other solutions to solving this?
Thanks,
Tomislav
The issue happens because I'm using the laptop with the lid down (I connect remotely to it). This seems to put the GPU to sleep/power down state which messes up the applications that use GPU acceleration. Interestingly desktop and some applications run normally.
Adding a fake display solved the issue (https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/Working-with-closed-lid/td-p/1623610, https://superuser.com/questions/1271344/fake-montitor-for-teamviewer-on-laptop-with-closed-lid).
I have also had this issue and have found that if you uninstall and delete the Intel Display Adapter, then let Windows automatically find the default, this issue is resolved.
After spending 14 hours on this I think its time to share my woes and see if anyone has experienced this issue before.
Ill describe the issue and tests I have done to rule out certain things.
Ok so I have a WPF application which loads in data from an SQL database.
I am using DevExpress Components for datagrids, ribbons etc.. and FluentNhibernate to provide a session for database operations. I am also using log4net to log events to a textfile.
Using the application on my laptop with SQL Express 2008 works fine.. the application starts up, retrieves 1000 records and I can tab through the controls on the ribbon.
Now, I decided to demo the application to a third party and used remote login/sharing software online to share my desktop with the other person so as I could load the application on my laptop and they could view me using the application.
Now, the application takes approx 45 seconds to load... 30 seconds with a blank database where as, when im not sharing out my screen using the online software the application loads in about 7-10 seconds. As well as that, even using the controls in the application during the demo were very sticky, slow and unresponsive.
During the sharing session though however I was able to use other applications without any problems.. everything else worked fine.
But I cannot understand how my application works ok under normal conditions , even browsing the net at the same time etc... BUT totally fails to perform correctly when I am sharing a session with another user... the CPU usage shot up to 100% too at times when the application was trying to start up...
Please see below a list of 3rd party dlls I am using as references in my project.
DevExpress dlls
FluidKit
PixelLab.WPF
PixelLab.Common
Galasoft WPF Kit
FluentNHibernate
NHibernate
Nhibernate.ByteCode.Castle
Skype4ComLib
TXTEXTControl
log4net
LinqKit
All of these DLLs are in the output folder with the application dlls created from the class assemblys in the project. So when installed via an installer on a machine the dlls will be in the same application folder as the application file itself.
Many thanks
I saw something similar about a year ago with logmein. The performance is not the app its the graphics processing . WPF renders graphically in a completely different way then GDI winforms see around 2.3 and down msdn article. Many remote desktop application have trouble rendering this correctly particularly if you don't use the plug ins (say logmein). You didn't say what you were using but I would suggest trying a few different RDP options as there are many out there, and making sure your on the newest versions.
Yes, as bumle-bee-tuna points out, WPF will default to software rendering over Remote Desktop. Another way may be to screen share using Skype or similar. This means you'll be rendering the app locally but transmitting an image to the remote user. the app should work at full speed and the only lag the viewer will see will be introduced by the Skype network. I've used this technique many times to deliver presentations remotely and works well!
I just like to code when i travel,but i can't carry my laptop while travelling so i thought of a mobile in which i can create apps in C#, .NET or Java but for that i need an IDE,Compiler,etc.
Basically I am looking for a phone / mobile / PDA (far more handy than a net-book or a laptop) in which i can code the way i can do it normally in Visual Studio installed in a machine.
So are there any such devices ?
Let's take a look at what you need to overcome to get this to work.
1) oomph
Smart phones are designed to give you the ability to stay in touch, and have a rich experience on the move, but within the confines of a device that can be put in your pocket. Storage isn't really an issue these days, but processing power on small devices are. Sure we can run calendar, 3D games (though nowhere near the complexity of what you'll see on a fully-fledged operating system), fart-applications and plug-ins for you-tube so we can watch idiots break their ballsacks on railings, but there's a reason you don't see a fully-fledged rich-desktop application, or Grand Theft Auto IV on these devices. Oomph. Now bring in the Visual Studio development environment (and database server, if that is what you're application is doing), with potentially 100s of source files in your language of choice. Assuming we put a severly cut-down version of your IDE on to your pda, I hope you brought some spare batteries or the power-cord because you're going to need it.
2) input
It's probably not difficult to change your predictive text input to cover all the keywords of your chosen language so that you don't end up typing pubic instead of public. Once we've solved that we then need to go through the agonizing process of the fact that computer code contains a lot of symbols and identifiers, meaning we'd have to switch our input mode every other word or two to facilitate it:
for(int i(0); i < _vector.length(); i++)
Takes a few seconds on a keyboard. Probably about one train journey on your PDA. To solve this, we must assume the PDA has the facility for an external keyboard to prevent suicide.
3) display
Ok, we've solved our oomph problems with a power-chord and/or 50 batteries and we've plugged in our external keyboard. We're ready to code!! We'll have to adjust the font-size on the display so that we can get more than 20 lines of code (vertically) or 10 (horizontally). I enjoy my comfort when I code, so I don't want to be squinting at a small screen as I type on my plug-in keyboard. I'd have to prop it up against some books or something (so I don't have to hold the PDA and the keyboard). Now I can't see what i am doing. So, I need a bigger display.
4) Target code
What platform are you targeting? Remember the PDA is designed to run software for the PDA in question. You won't be able to write fully-fledged win32 applications on Windows Mobile 7. There are differences in the API. What if it's a web app you're developing? We're going to have to add a web server to the phone too, unless that is deployed elsewhere and we can rely on an internet connection to upload the changed files to.
Have we solved the problem? Did we get more oomph? A keyboard? A bigger display? Yes we did.
It's a laptop.
It's impractical, as Moo-Juice mentioned. However, you could try using online compilers that work through web browsers, such as Compilr.com. Perhaps this could work well enough through a mobile device's web browser. This way you could write snippets of code and verify that it compiles. Otherwise, you'll be stuck getting a netbook or laptop.
Use a VNC client or Remote Desktop client or something.
Obviously your experience will not be very good on a phone/PDA, but I also don't have an IDE installed on my laptop -- I just use remote desktop (and a wireless modem if I'm desperately bored and can't find wifi).
I've written a WPF application (in Visual C# 2010 Express) that has 2 windows. The 1st has a various buttons, the other displays video using the MediaElement control. When a button is pressed, a video associated with it is played or stopped if it's already playing.
On my development machine (Windows 7, good graphics card, lots of memory etc), this runs fine. The only problem I've encountered is that when attached to the debugger it is very unstable but when run normally these issues go away.
Unfortunately when run on a much less powerful XP machine the videos run at 1-2fps. This is despite the fact that the videos run fine in Windows Media Player.
There seem to quite a lot of reports of poor performance for the MediaElement control (not to mention inconsistencies in what it can play) so I decided to look at some alternatives.
I tried a free library call WPF MediaKit (http://wpfmediakit.codeplex.com) that I thought might have some effect, however while I've got it to work on an XP machine, it resolutely refuses to display videos on my development machine despite using exactly the same code. I'm still hoping I can this to work but I'm not confident it will help given it's still using the MediaElement control behind the scenes.
I then tried using wmp.dll COM control (Windows forms rather than WPF) and even with the simplest app (new Windows Form project, WMP control added to form, and 1 line of code to set the URL on load) I get odd behaviour. With the debugger attached, it works across multiple monitors, but sometimes when it starts playing, it just repeatedly stutters over the 1st few frames and the only way to break it out of this seems to be to move it to the other monitor. If I'm not using the debugger, I don't seem to get the stutter issue but the video is only displayed on the main monitor, as soon as I move the window to the secondary monitor, it goes black.
So my question is has anyone experienced anything like the above and/or have a decent solution to it? It would be especially nice to find something that works consistently with and without the debugger attached!
Have you tried this library?
http://directshownet.sourceforge.net/about.html
There's also this .NET interface to VideoLAN media player, but that introduces a dependency to VLC:
http://wiki.videolan.org/.Net_Interface_to_VLC
WPF MediaKit does not use MediaElement behind the scenes, but instead uses the D3DImage interop class to provide high performance video to WPF.
WPF in XP has always been a hit-or-miss in terms of performance. You might want to take a look at the rendering tier to ensure WPF is fully hardware accelerating. Also make sure you have the newest video drivers available and that the GPU is capable.
-Jer