Does anyone know what's the technology used by MSN Messenger to create the GUI? Do you know any other software that uses this technology? Thanks

That's not going to help in my case.

I thought I could avoid api hooking because I can control the output file name. I'm currently looking into madCollection as it appears I have to use api hooking.

I'm familiar with Filemon, but it doesn't help me get the data and skip the disk writing.

I have a 3rd party program that writes data to a selected file. Instead of having the program write to a file, I'd like to be able to create a virtual file and capture the data the program writes. I've tried doing it with named pipes, but I can't get it to work*. Are there any other ways to create a virtual file? Thanks * Even though a simple CreateFile,WriteFile,CloseFile program works, the copy command returns "All pipe instances are busy." error and GUI programs just hang for a few seconds after I press save.

About GetTickCount errors, maybe it has to do with the macro GetCurrentTime which is defined as GetTickCount for backward compatibility. If that's the case, simply undefing the macro will do the job.

:eek: Don't you know gator is spyware? One should not trust a program that does a simple task yet consumes so much memory.

Your efforts are very kind, but I think you missed the point. If I understand the code correctly, it won't make the control windowless, which is my *only* problem. I have to make it windowless because I only want to show the flash GUI and nothing else. The only way I can achieve this without a windowless control would be to build a square GUI - but that would be unesthetic.

Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote: Interesting concept. How exactly is the flash stuff supposed to be laid out? Should it cover the entire client area, or can you instantiate windowless flash controls and tie them together in some way? There will be only one flash control which will be the entire client area. Flash can communicate with its hosting program via a special command in its ActionScript, which fires an event. Together with the interface we get a two-way communication. Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote: I also don't think you can "escape" the extra window in MFC. I'm not 100% sure about how MFC implements active x control hosting, but I suspect it does it similar to ATL/WTL. When I try it in MFC I get a debug output of 'control wants to be windowless'. When I override WM_ERASEBKGND, the flash control has no window around it. A search for the debug message led me to the file occsite.cpp, which led me to the ATL class IOleInPlaceObjectWindowlessImpl. I don't know if I can make something useful from the information, as I'm very new to the COM architecture, but if I do I'll probably write an article :)

This is bad news, because my intentions were to experiment with a GUI completely built in flash, and I can't do it with window background around it (if I want to use WTL, that is). Nonetheless, I thank you for your efforts and clarifications! But before I give up on WTL to do this job, can you give me some hints about hosting the control directly? How much coding and knowledge does it involve?

Thanks for the reply, but I still have no idea what I have to do :confused: Are you suggesting the problem is with my base class, CAxDialogImpl? Or should I subclass the control's window in a certain way? Thanks BTW, I'm using WTL 7.1.

You need admin rights. When most installtion programs run into this kind of situtation, they just tell the user they don't have enough rights. I don't think there's a way around it - as that would be insecure.

I'd like to know how to host a windowless ActiveX control in WTL, a Flash control in particular. In MFC, I add it to the dialog via the resource editor, change the control's window property to transparent and when I run the program I see in the debug output that 'Control wants to be windowless'. And indeed, the flash control is completely transparent. But when I follow the same steps in WTL, I can't get the control to lose its window. Thanks :)

It won't matter whether you get it or not, unless you deleted it by accident. That's because the header files contain only declarations of functions, not their implementation. I think sys/ioctl.h is a *nix header, if you're on windows you have little chance to compile the program (without many modifications to the code).

If I understand correctly, you can only pass string objects to exported functions if the dll was explicitly loaded via LoadLibrary?

Try searcing in google for abandonware.

What about OnActivate or OnFocus? (not 100% sure these are the exact names).