Detect USB - Insert/Remove - VB.NET on Windows CE 6.0 - vb.net

I'm becoming mad trying to figure out how to resolve this task. My goal is pretty easy, copy a file on the USB stick every time that it is inserted and then release the USB stick turning off the LED. What is the best way to solve it?
1) I found this article
http://geekswithblogs.net/BruceEitman/archive/2008/06/13/windows-ce-monitoring-for-disk-insertion-to-add-support-for.aspx
or
http://geekswithblogs.net/BruceEitman/archive/2008/06/13/windows-ce-monitoring-for-disk-insertion-to-add-support-for.aspx
but I can't translate it on VB.NET project.
2) Then I read that is enough to use RequestDeviceNotifications for block devices. But How can I do that in VB.NET?
I would like to avoid OpenNetCF if possible.
Thank you

Since you don't want to "use OpenNETCF" I assume that you don't want to use any libraries or capabilities not built in to the CF. We'll skip the argument of that silliness and the "value of your time" discussion and take that as a requirement.
What you need to do is:
Use P/Invoke to call CreateMsgQueue. That's going to give you back a Handle. You'll probably want to do CloseMsgQueue as well for completeness
P/Invoke RequestDeviceNotifications and pass it the handle returned from #1 above along with the DEVCLASS GUID value for the device notifications you want - probably STORE_MOUNT_GUID. Again, adding StopDeviceNotifications for completeness is a good idea.
At that point you'll get a message on the queue whenever a insert or remove happens. You then call ReadMsgQueue to get the DEVDETAIL data in the message.
Parse the DEVDETAIL and look at the fAttached member.

It'd take me a while to write that for you, so you'll need to do this on your own.
Start writing the project, find P/Invoke routines for the calls you need (like FindFirstFile and CreateProcess). On SO, have a look at Storage Card Problem In windows mobile and How to register form for WM_DEVICECHANGE message in windows mobile.
You are only going to be dead in the water if you can not find a particular call that you can't make.
As you work through your project, post (or search for) the actual problems you run into.
Otherwise, it sounds like you are asking someone to write the project and hand it to you.

Related

Track all ObjC method calls?

Sometimes when looking at someone else's large Objective-C program, it is hard to know where to begin.
In such situations, I think it would be helpful to log every call to every non-Apple method.
Is there a way to do that? Basically, make one change in some central place, and log every method that is called. Preferably limited to non-Apple methods.
You can set the environment variable NSObjCMessageLoggingEnabled to YES. This will write a log of all message sends in the folder /tmp/msgSends-xxx.
You could add a symbolic breakpoint to objc_msgSend(), and have it log the second parameter without stopping.
How to do it for your own methods only though is a toucher task. Maybe if you could inspect the class name being called and do some magic to have a conditional breakpoint for only calls where the class' prefix matches your own?
I don't think logging every single call is practical enough to be useful, but here's a suggestion in that direction.
On a side note, if it's a large program, it better have some kind of documentation or an intro comment for people to get started with the code.
In any case, every Cocoa application has an applicationDidFinishLaunching... method. It's a good place to start from. Some apps also have their principal (or 'main window') class defined in the Info.plist file. Both these things might give you a hint as to what classes (specifically, view controllers) are the most prominent ones and what methods are likely to have long stack-traces while the program is running. Like a game-loop in a game engine, or some other frequently called method. By placing a breakpoint inside such a method and looking at the stack-trace in the debugger, you can get a general idea of what's going on.
If it's a UI-heavy app, looking at its NIB files and classes used in them may also help identify parts of app's functionality you might be looking for.
Another option is to fire up the Time Profiler instrument and check both Hide missing symbols and Hide system libraries checkboxes. This will give you not only a bird's eye view on the methods being called inside the program, but also will pin-point the most often called ones.
By interacting with your program with the Time Profiler recording on, you could also identify different parts of the program's functionality and correlate them with your actions pretty easily.
Instruments allows you to build your own "instruments", which are really just DTrace scripts in disguise. Use the menu option Instrument >> Build New Instrument and select options like which library you'd like to trace, what you'd like to record when you hit particular functions, etc. Go wild!
That's an interesting question. The answer would be more interesting if the solution supported multiple execution threads and there were some sort of call timeline that could report the activity over time (maybe especially with user events plotted in somehow).
I usually fire up the debugger, set a breakpoint at the main entry point (e.g. - applicationDidFinishLaunching:withOptions:) and walk it in the debugger.
On OSX, there are also some command-line tools (e.g. sample and heap) that can provide some insight.
It seems like some kind of integration with instruments could be really cool, but I am not aware of something that does exactly what you're wanting (and I want it now too after thinking about it).
If one were to log a thread number, and call address, and some frame details, it seems like the pieces would be there to plot the call timeline. The logic for figuring out the appropriate library (Apple-provided or third party) should exist in Apple's symbolicatecrash script.

VGA programming without using interrupt (only registers)

I want to develop a VGA graphics driver (for Linux(Ubuntu)) with support for the basic primitives such as putpixel, drawline, fillrect and bitblt. I want to do it in protected mode.
I´ve been googling for a week and the following four links are the best I have found:
http://www.brackeen....vga/basics.html
http://www.osdever.n...VGA/vga/vga.htm
http://bos.asmhacker...sing%20bios.htm
Unfortunately, the first one uses a BIOS call so I cannot use it. The second link has lots of information on the VGA registers but no examples showing how to make them work together. The third example is a example to switch in 13h mode but i've tried it and nothing happened. Can you guys give me a hint? Thanks in advance!
--Vincenzo
my code at http://bos.asmhackers.net/docs/vga_without_bios/snippet_5/vga.php
works fine if you are in 32bit mode with full hardware access. Unfortunately I doubt that any Linux variant will let you directly access the VGA ports. I'm not sure how you develop this driver, but if you made sure that you have full access to the VGA ports it should work. In my example code I only switch between mode 0x03 and 0x13, but in the folders above you'll be able to find port values for most other common VGA modes, as well as C code to do the switch if you prefer that.
Christoffer code include files are found BOS operating system source code like text.inc and font8x16.inc
http://bos.asmhackers.net/downloads.php
This is coming many many years later but I think it's still very relevant and if somebody is struggling I hope they can find it useful.
First of all, it is completely possible to configure VGA only using registers without interrupts, as hard as it may be. A useful resource about registers and how to configure them can be found here, but unless you have a ton of time to spare to learn how to properly do all of it, move to the following section.
If you wish to really learn how to do it, I suggest going through with the documentation provided earlier. However, some of it is already done!
Chris Giese did a great job demonstrating exactly how to do this for MS-DOS system, and while you may think that doesn't help you, it really does.
Chris's code can be found here. If you want another useful codes check here as well.
Now, while it only works for MS-DOS it's actually easy to convert to other systems. The code already contains all data needed to configure the registers in many different modes. And that's the part that saves you a ton of time going through documentation.
The code uses functions outportb, inportb, which are MS-DOS functions, to write/read single byte to/from a port. Therefore, you have to redefine these functions to read/write for your own system. Redefinition complexity depends on the system you operate on.
In addition, you will also need to provide means to write to physical memory region between 0xA0000-0xBFFFF which corresponds to standard VGA memory area. Once you have that allocated, you need to also redefine the functions pokeb pokew peekb which will help you output things (text or pixel data) on the screen.
One last note: the code is already defined to work with many different modes including both text and display modes.

A GUI frontend for a confusing command-line interface?

Windows XP
The small company I work for just started using this command-line software and it's rather confusing and tedious. I was wondering if it would be feasible to make a GUI frontend and how I would start going about it.
If possible, I would like to have it get data to fill in dropdown boxes and such, but at the very least I'd like to be able to hit a button and perform whatever task. I have never done anything like this before so any help at all would be appreciated.
Thanks
There are two options here:
If the command line exe calls a dll or assemlbly to do the work, then you can work on a front end for the DLL based on the methods that it exposes (ie you can cut out the command line front end completely.
Alternatively you need to wrap the process that the command line runs in and catch its output, and pass it input as appropriate. There's a guide on how to write such a wrapper here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305994 (This one is based on writing the wrapper in c#).
One comment though - while it would be possible to do this in VB.Net using the illustrated techniques, doing it in VB6 would be much harder, or even impossible.

Automatic screenshot uploading on Mac like Cloud App

Cloud App has this neat feature wherein it automatically uploads new screenshots as they are added to the Desktop. Any ideas how this is done?
You can do similar things yourself without much in the way of programming. In OSX, you can configure "Folder Actions" to run a script, for example, when a new item appears in a folder, including the Desktop. You can then use the script to do whatever you want with the new files.
This article at TUAW includes an example of uploading files to a web server when they hit a particular folder.
So, basically, the answer is "Folder Actions", or "something's keeping an eye on the folder and sending notifications", at some level. Whether Cloud App uses Folder Actions or watches the folder itself at a lower level, using FSEvents/NSWorkspace, or the kqueue mechanisms (for which there's a nice wrapper class called UKKQueue, if I remember correctly -- don't know how current my knowledge is on that one though!) is another matter...
You could implement this at several different levels, depending on the outcome you want, how you want to design whatever it is you're actually doing, and even what kind of filesystem you're targeting. Fundamentally, in Cocoa/Objective C, I think you probably want to start looking at FSEvents.
Once you've got notifications of the file changes, I'd probably use something like ConnectionKit to do the uploading -- any library at all, really, that means you don't have to bother with the sockets level yourself -- but again, there's a lot of different ways.
Depends, really, what level you're looking to solve the problem at, and whether you want to build something for other people or get something working for yourself. If I just wanted to bash something together for myself, I could probably have something cobbled together using Coda's Transmit app, and Folder Actions, or maybe Hazel, and a minimal bit of Applescript, in a half-hour at most, that would do the job well enough for me...
I am not sure what you are asking for exactly. If you are asking for a way to take a screenshot programmatically in MacOSX, I suggest you have a look at the "screencapture" command (in the terminal, type "man screencapture" for doc).
If you want to do it the "hard" way, you should look at this.

Print complete control flow through gdb including values of variables

The idea is that given a specific input to the program, somehow I want to automatically step-in through the complete program and dump its control flow along with all the data being used like classes and their variables. Is their a straightforward way to do this? Or can this be done by some scripting over gdb or does it require modification in gdb?
Ok the reason for this question is because of an idea regarding a debugging tool. What it does is this. Given two different inputs to a program, one causing an incorrect output and the other a correct one, it will tell what part of the control flow differ for them.
So What I think will be needed is a complete dump of these 2 control flows going into a diff engine. And if the two inputs are following similar control flows then their diff would (in many cases) give a good idea about why the bug exist.
This can be made into a very engaging tool with many features build on top of this.
Tell us a little more about the environment. dtrace, for example, will do a marvelous job of this in Solaris or Leopard. gprof is another possibility.
A bumpo version of this could be done with yes(1), or expect(1).
If you want to get fancy, GDB can be scripted with Python in some versions.
What you are describing sounds a bit like gdb's "tracepoint debugging".
See gdb's internal help "help tracepoint". You can also see a whitepaper
here: http://sourceware.org/gdb/talks/esc-west-1999/
Unfortunately, this functionality is not currently implemented for
native debugging, but I believe that CodeSourcery is doing some work
on it.
Check this out, unlike Coverity, Fenris is free and widly used..
How to print the next N executed lines automatically in GDB?