As is well-known, WPF still doesn't supply a folder selection dialog (unless WPF4 has one that I've missed). In the meantime, I am using System.Windows.Forms.FolderBrowserDialog.
Unfortunately, this dialog only has a folder tree, OK, Cancel, and an optional "Make New Folder" button. The usability is poor. Particularly, it is terrible when trying to select a network folder. The only way to select the folder is to expand the "Network" base.. which on many corporate systems/networks, will begin a long delay and ultimately yield an unacceptably long list.
I would like a text entry field which would allow the user to start navigation at a particular location.. such as a particular computer/folder.. such as is possible in the file browse dialog.
Has anyone done such a thing? Is this a way to extend the standard System.Windows.Forms.FolderBrowserDialog, or will I have to create my own?
Thanks.
Vista Bridge provides managed wrappers for the new Vista dialogs with fallback support when running on older OS. These file dialogs are preferrable to either the stock WPF or WinForms ones.
The Windows API Code Pack provides managed wrappers for Windows 7 features.
I think you should create your own, no default folder dialog implement something like this. If I'm not wrong, java too doesn't allow such possibility.
I normally create the "open folder dialog" button near a textbox where the path can be written manually (when the folder dialog button is closed with ok button simply fill that textbox), that's the easiest way.
Your type of dialog should be created, on the good side you can at least sell it because it looks nice and helpful. Or maybe you can find something similar on the web (previous payment by the way).
Another thing, all folders dialog are very slow, at least on windows XP, maybe is "impossible" to reduce those delays, you should do some searches to avoid this problem (multi-threaded dialog which gather information while giving possibility to start navigating through directory tree is the only thing i can think about).
Hope this will be helpful
EDIT:
Maybe this has some sort of utility,
http://www.ssware.com/fldrview.htm
it looks cool but doesn't have all features you want, I think it doesn't exist as you hope
You wrap native code and use the SHBrowseForFolder function:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb762115(v=vs.85).aspx
Or starting with Vista you could use create a COM object with the id "CLSID_FileOpenDialog" (native code, too):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb776913(VS.85).aspx
Both of those provide a text input area where you can type in UNC paths.
Related
I'm aware of the FolderBrowseDialog and FolderBrowseDialogEx. However in my opinion these are both inferior to the below type of dialog:
This is more in line with the open file dialog, and gives access to the navigation pane (or whatever it is on the left).
I've seen it in a few programs (shown below is TortoiseHG), which makes me suspect that it a semi off-the-shelf component, and I'm just curious whether one is freely available. Unfortunately google-fu fails me and all I can find is the FolderBrowseDialog/Ex - so my question is, is there a pre-rolled version of this dialog box (if not in the .NET framework then elsewhere) that I can use?
This is free and seems to provide customization options. Try this out.
https://github.com/scottwis/OpenFileOrFolderDialog
and http://www.lyquidity.com/devblog/?p=136
I would like to know if there is any way to extend the task manager in a language like C# preferably but i'm also ok with C++, or anything else that works.
I would like to add some new features like, search, kill all processes with the same name, and what ever else comes to mind, but i have no idea were to start.
Note: I don't want to replace it or rewrite it from scratch, just add some new features.
I also found this link Is it possible to add functionality to Vista/7 taskmgr.exe? but it's for VIsta/7 i'm just hoping something change in 8, considering that it was completely redesigned.
Thank you
If i am correct, what you want to know is if there is a way to extend TaskManager via a plugin based approach( like Office/Ie/Outlook plugins).
The answer is no.
I however have a different approach which may help you do what you want but would be a lot more work.
What i suggest is Com interop based injection and override.
using Spy++ you can see what are the window classes/properties of the TaskManager window. Then you would need to write a program which works minimized(system tray?!) and watches for some identifying window/class name to pop up in the messages system. Windows messages can be intercepted and hooked. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/33459/Spying-Window-Messages-from-the-Inside may be of some help.
Once you get your window handle. you will probably need to find the tabs control group. and inject a new tab element. Post which you can put anything which you deem into the tab element.
This is speculative, and involves the assumption that all the new changes you want to add would end up in a new tab.
I hope this helps you in some way.
PS: The answer is not totally speculative though. For some internal use at my workplace, I had made a prototype which would do something similar to outlook and override some default functionality which wasn't exposed by the Add in framework per se. Beware that this would require lots of testing and was somewhat unreliable/unstable
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?
Question:
I need a DragAndDrop solution to download a file on drop in a folder of Windows Explorer for C# & .NET 4.0. It should not be necessary to have the file on the computer. The file will be big enough that the drag-time won't be enough to get the download done. I have found various questions, even accepted answers, but nothing that works. The very closest thing to something working is this demo project:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/delay/archive/2009/11/16/creating-something-from-nothing-and-knowing-it-developer-friendly-virtual-file-implementation-for-net-refined.aspx
How to implement this code to download a file as part of the action of putting it to the drop place in Windows Explorer?
Web browsers solve this problem every day. Simplifying their model a little, do this:
Make a little program that performs your download given appropriate command line parameters. This little program should pop up a window with a progress bar and a cancel button.
Spawn this second program whenever the user "drops" something. This program will create the target file immediately and start filling it with data. It will maintain appropriate locks on the file until it is done downloading, at which point the "downloader" will exit.
If you're going to keep the "downloader" threads in the originating program, you will need some kind of download manager so that the user can get appropriate feedback on their downloads.
Okay, as Yahia said in the comments it's not possible without a proper shell extension for the different versions of Windows and .NET. You might have luck with the link I posted, but for me it crashes the Explorer and the developer thinks it works fine.
My honest opinion is with only .NET you can only do it with a FileSystemWatcher via copying special .temp-files, watching where they land, doing your task and replacing the .temp files when your task is done. Sad Windows.
I want to create a program or use a program that will read the memory values out of another application. Does anyone know of an application/library that will do this?
The target app is this. I would like to read the exchange rate values from it.
I'm an experienced c# programmer, but have never worked with the Win32/user32 api which is what I'm assuming I'll have to deal with to pull this off.
Any help that gets me going in the right direction is greatly appreciated.
Update:
I managed to use Spy++ to get the window handle, so I'm sure I can get the values some how.
Have you looked into AutoIT or AutoHotKey?
Both of these open source options have well documented abilities to read text from application windows (and send keystrokes or mouseclicks to them).
AutoIT is very easy to use and well documented.
An example of reading text from a window would be:
$text = WinGetText("title of window", "")
MsgBox(0, "Text read was:", $text)
This can be compiled into an executable.
Typically an application creates controls in a dialog in a consistent manor, same ID, same order etc, so finding a control programatically is fairly simple. Using Spy++ find the control's ID and then you can search the windows created by the application for the desired control. Not being familiar with the app in question I cannot give specifics, but if Spy++ shows the value you desire, it is likely not difficult to obtain the value in your code.
What type of control is the value displayed in? You'll may be able to use GetDlgItemText to obtain the value once you have the parent window handle and control ID? To get the parent window try using EnumWindows.
It might be easier to scrape their data by automating a screenshot and then ocr process. If that's your goal.
Potentially relevant links:
get-a-screenshot-of-a-specific-application
ocr-with-the-tesseract-interface
May be this article helps - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163617.aspx, but I think it's not universal and for your task is better to get access directly to Forex API/Web-Service or try to catch needed data on network.
It is possible to screen-scrap things created with native windows controls; if that is the case, you should be able to see the controls using Spy++. But some times controls are implemented "by hand", and there is no way to screen-scrap them (e.g. some Java graphic toolkits play directly with the graphics, so everything day do is meaningless from the outside, or even some Office menus are implemented without using the menu control).
The Windows accessibility API is a possible way to screen-scrap the values; check if "Narrator", the screen reader that comes with windows, is able to read aloud your target application.