I feel obligated to report I did find another software registation company a couple of weeks ago - iPortis.com. My product was up and running with them with zero problems the day after I talked to them. (The algorithm and everything else.) I have no desire to plug iPortis, except to say they were the very first company I encountered after ditching RegNow, and somehow they were able to do their job.

RegNow - A Company Beneath Contempt: A Study in Fraud, Negligence and Incompetence For those who are not familiar with RegNow, it is a software registration company, a company that ostenstibly handles the money end for commercial software developers. When trial users of your software decide to buy, they are directed to a RegNow sponsored page that gets their name, credit card info, etc. and sends them a software key. RegNow and most other software registration companies online are now owned by the monopolistic conglomerate Digital River. My experiences with RegNow started back in February. The way your relationship with them works as a software vendor/developer is that they get a percentage of each sale. Otherwise no other money exchanges hands between you and them, i.e. they don't charge you any other fee for their services other than the commission they make. This is significant because I believe they could be exploiting the fact that no actual money exchanges hands to possibly claim they have no contractual responsibilities to you. So if there are problems with your order page, they can send you polite e-mails saying they are looking into it, but with a tacit assumption on their end that they don't actually have to do anything (and in fact they probably won't, and rather just wait for you to leave in frustration.) But anyway, back in February I set up my order page and product at RegNow. I chose the option to use SoftwarePassport to protect my software and generate a key for it. I did not know at the time (and had to find out for myself as they didn't tell me) that the RegNow version of SoftwarePassport will not protect DLL's. As a result, I had to ask them to delete my product on their end so I could start over from scratch. (If you have a faulty product setup at RegNow, they have to delete it, you cannot delete it yourself.) So anyway I had them delete my product and I started over. This time I chose another option for generating a software key that is fully documented by them: using a custom key-generating algorithm. You write your own program that outputs a key and send RegNow the source code for it. This is the program that is executed and generates a key when the user orders the software on their site. So anyway, that is what I did - I wrote my own key-generating program - no big deal. However, my order page never worked. Five months later it still doesn't work. When the user hits 'order now', either it never returns, or if it does the place where the key is suppos

Probably should add that whole thing is running in a seperate thread from the UI. (CreateThread, etc.)

  SECURITY\_ATTRIBUTES sa = {sizeof(sa),NULL,TRUE};
  HANDLE hProcOut = CreateFile("proc.out",GENERIC\_READ|GENERIC\_WRITE,
     FILE\_SHARE\_READ,&sa,CREATE\_ALWAYS, FILE\_ATTRIBUTE\_NORMAL, 0);
  .
  .
  .
      STARTUPINFO   si;
      ZeroMemory((PVOID)&si,sizeof(si));
      si.cb = sizeof(si);
      si.dwFlags = STARTF\_USESHOWWINDOW | STARTF\_USESTDHANDLES;
      si.wShowWindow = SW\_HIDE;
      si.hStdOutput = hProcOut;
      si.hStdError = hProcOut;

      PROCESS\_INFORMATION  pi;

      if (CreateProcess(0,cmd,0,0,TRUE,
          CREATE\_DEFAULT\_ERROR\_MODE,0,default\_dir,&si,&pi)) {

        DWORD  ExitCode;
        float elpsed\_crnt=0;

        while (1) {

          Sleep(250);

          GetExitCodeProcess(pi.hProcess,&ExitCode);
          if (bCancel || (ExitCode != STILL\_ACTIVE)) {
            if (bCancel) TerminateProcess(pi.hProcess,0);
            CloseHandle(pi.hProcess);
            CloseHandle(pi.hThread);
            break;
          }

        }
      }

Maximilien wrote:

Me think all skin libraries are never good enough for what you intend to do. (not that I have a large experience with that) anyway, I have skins, skins are the bane of UI development. Keep it simple.

You may be right. USkin has fewer glitches than AppFace has.

I just tried AppFace and it works thus far. Only its using some skin file type called .urf I'm not familiar with. Hopefully it understands .msstyles as well

Maximilien wrote:

Me think all skin libraries are never good enough for what you intend to do. (not that I have a large experience with that) anyway, I have skins, skins are the bane of UI development.

Point taken. However, the browser I'm using now, SlimBrowser, is skinned. In fact so is Avant Browser now that I think of it. If you downloaded a browser that wasn't, you would think "Amateur."

Just searched the message archives (which I hadn't discovered previously - only the article archives) Found the following (in the Visual C++/MFC section): http://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/View.aspx?fid=1647&msg=2187526[^]

Hello, Anybody knows some skin tool to became my APP skinable? I found SkinCrafter and AppFace? Anybody knows these? Thanks, Cris.

I thought this was ostensibly a forum for C++ developers - not just for people attempting to learn C++ from abusive instructors.

I was trying to determine the most used developer library for skinning an application - not skinning the entire desktop, just one specific application you're developing to give it a distinctive look. The one thing I found is from a company called CodeJock. The demo DLL you download from them is over 10 mgs, which seems to be overkill to me. Also its purely an MFC object framework thing, and you have to be using MFC (and also they're charging like they have a monopoly which isn't a good sign.) There is an article on CodeProject regarding something called Uskin, which is not bad. ITs a flat api and skins your entire application with one call - USkinInit. Like I said, its pretty good, its just not quite there from a production standpoint. So I was wondering what everyone else is using to do this sort of thing. I've discovered there are two approaches to all this - One uses the XP native msstyles file and the other use WindowBlinds prorprietary approach. As far as I know WindowBlinds just skins your entire desktop, though.

typedef DWORD (*GETNGLYPHS)(HDC hdc,LPCTSTR lpstr,int c,LPWORD pgi,DWORD fl); GETNGLYPHS GetGlyphIndices = (GETNGLYPHS)GetProcAddress(LoadLibrary("gdi32.dll"), "GetGlyphIndicesA"); . . . GetGlyphIndices(hdc,save_chrs,sg_cnt,save_glyphs,1);

Giorgi Dalakishvili wrote:

Yes, I'm trying to locate a specific control but I won't know its id in advance, I'll only know its class name.

You can get the control ID with Spy++, or I imagine lots of other utilities as well. If you know enough about the application, then I guess the classname would suffice (also a unique control ID is just convention, and not something that's enforced.)

Giorgi Dalakishvili wrote:

I just forgot about EnumChildWindows. Should I prefer it to GetNextWindow? Is there any significant difference between them?

You mentioned it three days ago in the C# thread, and even supplied the msdn link. AS far as differences, to me its just more compact than calling GetWindow or GetNextWindow in a loop. Also, the documentation says, "[EnumChildWindows] is more reliable than calling the GetWindow function in a loop. An application that calls GetWindow to perform this task risks being caught in an infinite loop or referencing a handle to a window that has been destroyed. " EnumChildWindows does actually return all descendants of a given window and not just immediate children.

Giorgi Dalakishvili wrote:

GetDlgCtrlID returns int, how would you check for class name?

I assumed you were just trying to locate a specific control, and using the classname for that purpose. If you're just looking for any control of a certain class, then of course you can use GetClassName. Why would you think to use GetNextWindow as opposed to EnumChildWindows?

Giorgi Dalakishvili wrote:

One possible way I'm thinking of is enumerating all controls on the form using GetNextWindow and checking control's class using GetClassName function.

I would use EnumChildWindows and check for the ctrlID for each Child Window using GetDlgCtrlID. The Ctrl ID will be unique and won't change.

Giorgi Dalakishvili wrote:

I'm not experienced in Visual c++

Well, it seems you already knew about EnumChildWindows and even how to invoke it from C#: http://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/View.aspx?fid=1649&msg=2558300[^]

A rich edit returns an IRichEditOle interface ptr via EM_GETOLEINTERFACE. Then, you can call IRichEditOle::GetObject( LONG n, REOBJECT* reobj, DWORD flags) to retrieve the REOBJECT for some image in the richedit. Does anyone know how to modify that reobject. Specifically I want to change the dwUser field. The following does not work: REOBJECT reobj = {sizeof(reobj)}; pRichEditOle->GetObject(0,&reobj,REO_GETOBJ_ALL_INTERFACES); CHARRANGE cr = {reobj.cp,reobj.cp}; SendMessage(hwnd,EM_EXSETSEL,0,(LPARAM)&cr); reobj.cp = REO_CP_SELECTION; reobj.dwUser = n; pRichEditOle->InsertObject(&reobj);

//In DlgProc: if ((msg == WM_MOUSEACTIVATE) && (HIWORD(lParam) == WM_LBUTTONDOWN)) { POINT pt; GetCursorPos(&pt); int ctrlID = GetDlgCtrlID(WindowFromPoint(pt))); }

Within the WM_MOUSEACTIVATE handler, I guess you could call GetDlgCtrlID(GetFocus()) to get the identity of the control.

What about WM_MOUSEACTIVATE? Sincerely, Spy++

Just to be clear, you can load another flash page into any other flash page without any problem, using something called SWFLoader. There's also something called URLLoader, but for some reason it doesn't allow you to load an html page. And it really makes no sense why this functionality would not exist. Maybe Microsoft threatened to destroy them if they included it, who knows.

led mike wrote:

Wow what a pile of garbage, and you are doing all this for what purpose? I mean why is it important or what feature or whatever is it intended to provide?

Ummmm... I want to have iframe capability in a flash program like iframes exist on an html page. I think the utility of being able to display some web page within another web page (or in a flash program) should be self evident. There are implementations of iframes I've seen for flex and actionscript that utilize the mechanisms I described, but the ones I've seen thus far seem to be lacking some functionality I'm looking for. As far as the "garbage" comment, I don't really understand either, what technical hurdles could possibly exist that would cause Adobe to exclude this extremely important functionality from their platforms. However, their capabilities in many areas are dazzling, and that is why Microsoft created Silverlight, to try to compete with them.