Monitor 3rd party app (hooking/subclassing)
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Hello all, I am searching on the net for 2 days and I am reading a lot about Hooking and Injecting your own dll's into another process, but I don't get clear what technique is usefull for me. Let me explain what I want to accomplish. I want to monitor a 3rd party application what actions a user takes, like he opened an options window and on the close button click I want to get the values he entered. Or he opened a process that takes a while (like processing a document). I looked into some things, but can get a clear view on this.. Can someone helps me out? Many thanks in advance, Derck (P.S. I don't find many vb.net samples on hooking or subclassing :()
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Hello all, I am searching on the net for 2 days and I am reading a lot about Hooking and Injecting your own dll's into another process, but I don't get clear what technique is usefull for me. Let me explain what I want to accomplish. I want to monitor a 3rd party application what actions a user takes, like he opened an options window and on the close button click I want to get the values he entered. Or he opened a process that takes a while (like processing a document). I looked into some things, but can get a clear view on this.. Can someone helps me out? Many thanks in advance, Derck (P.S. I don't find many vb.net samples on hooking or subclassing :()
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Go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/default.aspx[^] and do a search for "Hooks". You will find some very interesting articles written by Dino Esposito.
Hi, Thanks for your reply.. I already looked into this article, but I need a way to monitor 3rd party applications where I don't have any source from.. I am looking for a couple days now and I don't get a clear picture where to start. I know it's not simple, but I need to know what technique is useful for me.. Thanks in advance!
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Hello all, I am searching on the net for 2 days and I am reading a lot about Hooking and Injecting your own dll's into another process, but I don't get clear what technique is usefull for me. Let me explain what I want to accomplish. I want to monitor a 3rd party application what actions a user takes, like he opened an options window and on the close button click I want to get the values he entered. Or he opened a process that takes a while (like processing a document). I looked into some things, but can get a clear view on this.. Can someone helps me out? Many thanks in advance, Derck (P.S. I don't find many vb.net samples on hooking or subclassing :()
Plain and simple, you can't without in-depth knkowledge of the 3rd party app. There are two ways: 1.) Use DDE 2.) Get the Window Handle and use some API like we did in VB6 to subclass that windows' WndProc event into your own window. I'll tell you now, since every window, including controls, have their own WndProc, you're not going to be able to write a "Global" handler for some app's events. Unless this 3rd party app is supplying an API (like Adobe or MS Word, Outlook for example), you can't do it.
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Plain and simple, you can't without in-depth knkowledge of the 3rd party app. There are two ways: 1.) Use DDE 2.) Get the Window Handle and use some API like we did in VB6 to subclass that windows' WndProc event into your own window. I'll tell you now, since every window, including controls, have their own WndProc, you're not going to be able to write a "Global" handler for some app's events. Unless this 3rd party app is supplying an API (like Adobe or MS Word, Outlook for example), you can't do it.
Many thanks! I will look into the options you gave me.. What I need is 1) Detects a user close the options form (like windows messenger) 2) Capture and save the values he entered.. I am not making a global spy util (maybe it is), but I want to monitor an application like Crystal Reports what actions the user did and what data he saw... Maybe there are some other options? Thanks!