Prevent Window Focus Change - c#

I'm trying to help a disabled person with a small bit of code to help him play a game easier. He is limited to a trackball and a single button.
Currently he uses the onscreen keyboard and has managed to play other games using it. I've created a small bit of code to try and make his live easier. It uses hover buttons for the keys. When the mouse pointer enters the button it sends key down, when it moves off the button it sends key up.
I have that working and I think (or hope) he's going to like it. It worked pretty well when I tested it.
I want to add one more piece of functionality to it. If he clicks while over my control, I want to send a different key stroke. Not a problem, I can do that. However, when I do that window focus shifts from the game to my control.
I found this on MSDN:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/48737c2b-7e6f-4ade-ac1c-7dd2f5cc2b88/
That works to prevent my window from activating, but it still causes the game to lose focus. I can set the focus back to the game, but I would prefer if it just never lost focus.
I'm coding in C# and WPF.
Anyone have any ideas on how you might do that?
John Fenton

Hook in some low level mouse and keyboard hooks, and your application won't need to steal focus and give it back.
Take a look at this pastie of a simple WPF app, which is heavily based off of an article by Stephen Toub.
Whenever you left click, anywhere, a second left click is sent, so you effectively double click. You could achieve your goal by hiding your app whenever the user clicks, so that your app never steals focus. Then detect the location of the click, and decide if one of your buttons would have been pressed, and act accordingly.
I realize I'm digging this out of the past, but hopefully someone will find this answer helpful. Cheers, and good for you for turning your programming to assist a fellow human!

You could try canceling the event PreviewLostKeyboardFocus as mention in this blog:
http://immortalratblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/canceling-keyboard-focus-change-in-wpf.html
Im guessing that focus is lost be simulating the key press?

Related

Trying to detect and gather data on click outside application

I would like to know if it is possible to, while running a WPF window application in Visual Studio, wait for the user to click anywhere on the screen (not necessarily inside the window of my application - for the purpose of my application, the click would most likely occur inside a browser page) and then gather the information about the click (like inside the window of which application the user clicked, or the selector of the html element the user clicked)? I know this question might be very confunsing but this is basically my last resort since researching on the Internet hasn't helped me much. Just to provide a better idea of what I seek, it's like what the 'Extract Structured Data' Activity does in UiPath. Oh and I'm using C# by the way.
You can try and use this external library called GlobalMouseHook.
This library allows you to tap keyboard and mouse, detect and record their activity even when an application is inactive and runs in background.
Here is what you can do with this library:
Mouse coordinates
Mouse buttons clicked
Mouse drag actions
Mouse wheel scrolls
Key presses and releases
Special key states
Hope this helps.

change mouse button function

i've new mouse gaming that have several additional button. this mouse doesn't include application to allow user modifying function for the button. i like to change just like sharpkeys do. If there's any application that can allow me, can you tell me what is it? Or if there's no application yet, i im interested to starting developing.
for development choice, i've 2 option, develop with electron(javascript) or c#(the same programming language used by sharpkeys). can you recommend me which one is better?
update:
from this following link
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MouseEvent/button
we can detect that every button has their own key code, my mouse button additional key code is 3 and 4. how can i modify these key become a same function like home/end in my computer keyboard?
You didn't state clearly about what you want to achieve.
Press a mouse button and act like "go to top of the page" ( what home key does ).
Press a mouse button and act like press home, and press home is defined by yourself.
I'll try to answer both.
According to your link, I found this
For solution 1.
You need mouse button act as "go to the top of page", you shall dig about how to "go to
the top of page".
For solution 2.
Keyboard event will tell you which key is pressed.
You may route mouse event and keyboard event to the same function.
i'm also found other application for alternatives for the solution to my problem, It's Mouse Manager. However, i'm still interested to develop application that can customize the mouse gaming button, for future development.

Reproducing InputManagerTest Buttons

(Crosspost to Mixed Developer forums because they're still very inactive.)
Going through the HoloToolkit examples, I'm trying to reproduce the button input example in the InputManagerTest example for a GUI I'm making. Reproducing the button seems to cause a hiccup though. Here's what I do:
I add a Canvas
I add a Button to that Canvas
That's basically it. This looks very similar to the example. My scene, as well, as the InputManager, EventSystem, and Camera as instructed in the tutorial.
However, in the example, the button responds to Gaze, and hand click, which is what I want.
In my example, my button responds to my mouse and mouse click though. I also cannot change its color from the default.
Does anyone know why this all would be?
I can answer my own question. Standalone Input Module is automatically added as a component of the Event System in the current build. This sets the default input to be the mouse cursor. Disabling this component fixes the issue.

Detecting UserControl User Custom Cursor, and Getting Callbacks

I am creating a fullscreen demo application (demo = not production, so hacky code is okay though not preferred) for the Kinect SDK. The application hides the Windows cursor and shows a custom hand cursor which is defined as a object.
What I would like to do is create a custom UserControl (let's call it "HoverControl") that can detect when the cursor object is over it and then send back timer ticks, allowing the cursor object to update in some way (showing the user that something is about to happen).
The behavior is pretty much a copy of the Xbox 360 Kinect behavior. How things look will just be a little different.
How can I detect with the cursor object is over a "HoverControl" and have receive a callback from the HoverControl?
Thank you for any help or suggestions!
CLARIFICATION:
I am not currently moving the Windows cursor, so MouseEnter doesn't fire.
You can use your own cursor by making one using Online Cursor Maker. See this website on how to set it. Then you can use MouseEnter and/or MouseLeave.
Coding my own cursor in XAML, and creating a UserControl out of it, I set up a timer inside the control to perform a hit test for certain buttons (again, their own unique UserControl type) around my interface.
I ran into one issue with the hit test, which I was ultimately able to solve and detail in the following post at MSDN:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/a8cdb265-21cc-4fd0-b40d-e6778b659852

Gain Access to Mouse Clicks in C# Component

I am using the ScintillaNET component and I am attempting to capture clicks in the margin, as this will determine how I respond. Unfortunately, the margins capture the mouse events (and don't provide a way, from what I can see, to get the click information - number of clicks, mouse button clicked, etc).
If this is indeed the case (I am not able to get that info directly), what is another way of capturing what the mouse is doing before the MarginClick event is fired?
Thanks for any help!
I did not figure out a solution to my specific question. Instead, I changed my code to look at the modifier keys that are pressed when the MarginClick event is fired. This solution works well, and I am going to accept this answer. However, if someone can specifically answer my question, I will accept that answer.

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