Hi all, I am just wondering if there are any good XAML templates for Windows 10. Unfortunately VS2015 provides just a blank template... from my point of view this quite minimalistic for a release version of Visual Studio, and Windows Phone and Store apps always had at least some Pivot style apps (even though these have been quite minimalistic either :D), etc. Anyhow, I am looking for some templates that look like Groove Music or the new Maps app. Are there any good resources out there? Thanks in advance!

Hi, usually I am good in using Google... but so far I did not find any solution for this particular problem. And unfortunately your link is also just the standard MSDN page on how to load a resource with CanvasBitmap. But the documentation does not mention how to share ONE CanvasBitmap across TWO or more CanvasControls. Sorry, still searching an answer for my question. :) Or maybe this not possible...? Cheerio

I am using Win2D and the Canvas control. Actually, it is two canvas controls and for both I am using the same image as input. Is it somehow possible to share a CanvasBitmap? Up to now I have to create two bitmaps and to call LoadAsync for each... that takes more time and memory than actually necessary. Cheers, Roland

Hi everyone, I have a HBITMAP with alpha channel information. The alpha channel should already be premultiplied. Nevertheless, when using GDI's AlphaBlend(..) function, the bitmap seems to have "black borders", means the semi-transparent areas are simply black. Does this mean I am doing something wrong? Or is AlphaBlend that limited? I guess I should avoid legacy GDI AlphaBlend, maybe some has a clue what alternatives I'd have for a dialog based application? Is there something better in GDI+ for bitmaps with transparency? I am not really convinced to go for D2D for this bitmap only. ;-) Cheers, Don Rolando

I have seen samples for custom code editors (modified syntax highlighting, intellisense, etc.) and I have seen samples for custom visual editors (as UI for editing files when opening with visual studio). But: How can someone build Visual Studio extensions which allow both; a split code/design as the built-in XAML editor offers? Is that possible without creating my proprietary editor control from scratch as part of my view? Any hints appreciated PS: My goal would be some custom XML with an visual representation on top. Comparable to the XAML editor, but not for UI stuff.

Thanks for the hint. Have searched for such a forum, but didn't find it... seems somehow lost in the list of all forums on bottom there. ;-)

I have seen samples for custom code editors (modified syntax highlighting, intellisense, etc.) and I have seen samples for custom visual editors (as UI for editing files when opening with visual studio). But: How can someone build Visual Studio extensions which allow both; a split code/design as the built-in XAML editor offers? Is that possible without creating my proprietary editor control from scratch as part of my view? Any hints appreciated :) PS: My goal would be some custom XML with an visual representation on top. Comparable to the XAML editor, but not for UI stuff.

Yes, we create both, the GUI and the Console Apps. The latter one can be executed manually or started through the UI (invisible). So we are actually realy monitoring the UI, but had no (good) idea how to make the console show itself when the GUI was gone. But as a result of Alan's thought-provoking impulse I have an idea how to do this now. :) Cheers, Roland

Hi Alan, thanks for your reply! At the moment I really make use of a combination of EnumWindows and GetWindowThreadProcessId to get my own (hidden) window's handle within the console application. But I am not happy about enumerating over all windows. FindWindow was also my first thought... the problem was that I had no clue what the title is. The shell usually shows the console application's full path in the title. Having multiple instances running, this can be quite difficult to find a specific one. But you made me think about the window title again, because you really hardcoded a title for a console application. First I thought I could not change it from within the console application itself in C#, since MainWindowTitle is read-only. But then I found the following API method:

[DllImportAttribute("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)]
public static extern bool SetConsoleTitle(IntPtr lpConsoleTitle);

In this case I can easily set the window title; either by passing it as parameter along with ProcessStartInfo, or simply generating it within the console itself. Thanks for thought-provoking impulse. :) Cheers, Roland

Sorry, but from my point of view your post was already inpolite. ;P I know how to google and how to send messages, I am no noob. But if you have no window handle as recipient, you will never send messages anywhere. And the page you linked uses Process' MainWindowHandle property which is always NULL for hidden windows. (As written in my initial post, maybe you have only scanned the first lines of it.) No window handle, no chance to send the message. Seems I have really to enumerate over all windows and find the hidden window that belongs to the process... what a hack...

Oh funny reply, dude! Was the question how to send window messages in general? As I said before, you'd have to know who is the recipient for that message, and actually THAT is the problem. A hidden application has no idea about it's main window's hwnd. And a console application cannot set it's window title to make other apps find it by FindWindow with given title.

Could you please go into details a little more? What window message would you send to whome? ShowWindow is also just sending SW_SHOW in the end, but I would need to know the window handle of the console application before I can send it there... Cheers, Roland

Hi everyone, we have an GUI application that starts and observes several console processes. Because it can be lots of processes, we are starting these console applications hidden:

Process process = new Process();
process.StartInfo.FileName = dir + @"\ConsoleApp.exe";
process.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
process.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
process.Start();

So far so good, no shell is showing up! But if the user closes the user interface (which started these processes) all the console applications are still running. Since they should finish their job, this is more or less ok. But we would like to show each console again, so the user could stop them if necessary or watch output in each shell himself. Any idea how to show the console applications again? The preferred approach would be that each console application can show itself. (So they would pop up again even if the GUI simply crashed) I have looked into the process information, but the MainWindowHandle property is set to null for the console applications, so I can't use it to show the shell. That's also true for any other combination of startinfo properties which lead to a hidden console. In contrast, Spy++ shows a hidden window for my hidden console app! So how to obtain the (still hidden) window's handle? Or any other idea how to show these hidden consoles again? Cheers, Roland

jschell wrote:

I bet you were doing work in there.

You are right, I did. For testing purpose I was calling a dispatcher to show in the UI that the EventWaitHandle's thread received the signal. When removing the line with the dispatcher call, it works. Ahm, but why does the dispatcher corrupt the whole EventWaitHandler? To be honest, your suggested approach is also some kind of custom dispatcher, isn't it? Could you enlight me why this has influence on the EventWaitHandle at all?

It's actually really a requirement. We are working on local machine only (also in the future) and want to avoid the network stack. As mentioned before, we only need some trigger, there is no information to transfer. If we'd be using the network stack anyhow, I'd reather prefer to broadcast something on UDP instead of starting some server/hub along with the first process. :) But since it is really just a trigger without any content, I cannot imagine that there is no simple signalling on OS-level...? Although, maybe there is really nothing. :sigh:

Hi everyone, I have "unlimited" processes (let's say 5 to 20 is a realistic number) What I need is the following: From time to time one of the processes has to signal the others that they have something to do. There is no master, so I won't create some server which passes arround events for all interested processes. There is also no message/content, so I would favor some low-level signalling. But without a master process IPC is not very handy at all. WaitEventHandle seemed to be a good choice; even though it also works on process-level, it does not always work properly. Every listening process has a thread whichs calls WaitOne(); when the event is sent it starts some action, calls Reset() and loops back to WaitOne(). The process which wants to indicate something creates a WaitEventHandle with the same name and calls Set(). In a simple hello world application this worked pretty well; but in some other application exactly the same approach never passes the second WaitOne(). Just as if noone would call Set anymore (but the other process still does!) Is there any other useful low-level signalling? I am also not happy about the background thread with the do-while around the WaitOne(). Why are there no monitors or counters that simply fire an event when some equally named object in a different process/thread raises an event. :p Cheerio, Roland

Just wanted to know if there is some possibility to list all registered named pipes on a machine? WCF allows working with named pipes for IPC, but it seems that named pipes are just good to connect to one specific process/pipe. A n:n relation of clients and servers seems hardly to realize, if you cannot have a look for registered pipes and to find those that have part of some ID in their name... And ideas? Maybe sharing some pipe would allow to provide some classes to multiple clients? Cheers, Roland

I just wonder if a (dependency)Object can be made aware of data bindings, e.g. if it acts as binding source. It would be nice to get an event from somewhere to realize that someone bound to my object and to get the path that was used on it. So the object could see that a binding to one of it's public properties was created. But seems like the .NET framework offers no such capabilities for data binding. :( Any ideas or suggestions how to create something comparable? Cheerio, Don Rolando

Hi everyone, I have an ActiveX control (or simply say a COM control) which was used within some applications so far. As a new requirement this control should also be running within the browser. So far so good, it works quite flawless. But when a page including the control is opening, the bar for activating activeX is shown every time. This is not really great user experience if the prompting is done with every new browser session again and again. Furthermore I have some cases where the current -element is created at run-time. In this case the prompting is not done at all, the object is simply not initializing (except if you have allowed activeX within the same browser session before) So my question is: Can I install my control in such a a way that IE allows showing it whout prompting? Maybe simply signing the DLL? Registering it as BHO? (All BHO-related stuff I found was gui-less, so it did not help me so far.) How are plug-ins for IE developed usually? As I said, BHO offers no examples for content controls, maybe there is some NAPI-like interface for this? Has somebody usefull ideas how to develop a content control such as Flash that is simply installed and running in the browser without any prompting? Thanks, Roland

I cannot add a service reference for my java-side web service, WCF (or svcutil) simply does not generate the client. :( I have stripped it down to this simple example, but still, there seems to be something wrong with the Fault... can anybody help me? I am currently lost.

<wsdl:definitions name="HelloWorldService"
targetNamespace="http://my.samle.com/HelloWorldService/"
xmlns:tns="http://my.samle.com/HelloWorldService/"
xmlns:soap12="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap12/"
xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

<wsdl:types>
	<xsd:schema xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
		xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
		targetNamespace="http://my.samle.com/HelloWorldService/">
			
		<xsd:simpleType name="NoObjectFoundFault">
			<xsd:restriction base="xsd:int"></xsd:restriction>
		</xsd:simpleType>
		
		<xsd:element name="NoObjectFoundFault" type="tns:NoObjectFoundFault"></xsd:element>
		
		<xsd:simpleType name="SayHelloRequest">
			<xsd:restriction base="xsd:string"></xsd:restriction>
		</xsd:simpleType>
		
		<xsd:element name="SayHelloRequest" type="tns:SayHelloRequest"></xsd:element>
		
		<xsd:simpleType name="SayHelloResponse">
			<xsd:restriction base="xsd:int"></xsd:restriction>
		</xsd:simpleType>
		
		<xsd:element name="SayHelloResponse" type="tns:SayHelloResponse"></xsd:element>
	</xsd:schema>
</wsdl:types>

<wsdl:message name="NoObjectFoundFault">
	<wsdl:part name="faultCode" element="tns:NoObjectFoundFault"></wsdl:part>
</wsdl:message>

<wsdl:message name="sayHello">
	<wsdl:part element="tns:SayHelloRequest" name="parameters1" />
</wsdl:message>
<wsdl:message name="sayHelloResponse">
	<wsdl:part element="tns:SayHelloResponse" name="parameters2" />
</wsdl:message>


<wsdl:portType name="HelloWorld">
	<wsdl:operation name="sayHello">
		<wsdl:input message="tns:sayHello"></wsdl:input>
		<wsdl:output message="tns:sayHelloResponse"></wsdl:output>
		<wsdl:fault name="fault" message="tns:NoObjectFoundFault"></wsdl:fault>
    </wsdl:operation>
</wsdl:portType>

<wsdl:binding name="HelloWorldSOAP" type="tns:HelloWorld">

	<soap12:binding style="document"
		transport="http://w