TL;DR Can I make a VB.net form visible on the Windows lock screen [i.e. when a user hits WIN+L]?
I wrote an alert system that notifies staff of a 'lockdown' in vb.net. This has been tested in drills a few times but today it was noted that the 'alert window' does not appear when the screen is locked.
The alert window does make an alarm sound, which can still be heard even when the computer is locked but this is dependant on the machine having speakers that are turned on...
The workstations are running Windows 7.
Edit
I am not looking to spawn a separate process, just get the 'lockdown.vb' form showing on top of the windows lock screen.
Googling this has just given me a load of tutorials on making a lockscreen...which is not what I'm after, hence the question. :-)
I have written a WinForms driver safety application for a windows tablet device that will blank the screen (display a full screen blank topmost window) when it detects that the car is moving at say more that 15km/h (using the tablets GPS).
The software has worked fine under Windows 7 but I'm struggling a bit to get it working under Windows 8. My first challenge is to display the blank screen when the Metro start menu is currently displayed. So if the user has the Metro start menu displayed and the car starts moving > 15 km/h my blank screen should display... I need to steal the focus from the metro interface and display my blank window on the desktop.
To test this I wrote a simple vb.net app in 2010. It had a form with a timer firing every 3 seconds. In the Tick event I had the code:
Beep()
Me.Activate()
When I ran this with the debugger and pressed the windows key to show the Metro Start Menu, it worked... The focus switched back to the desktop (and my window). However, when I ran this without the debugger and did the same thing I could hear the beeps but the focus never switched back to the desktop.
Any ideas why the behaviour would be different? Any ideas on how I replicate the same behaviour I get when the debugger is attached?
I have tried a few things like AppActivate, setting the form TopMost, BringToFront but unfortunately this hasn't worked.
The only half solution I have come up with is to send a windows button keystroke but this has other issues.
Windows specifically tries to prevent applications from stealing the foreground from other apps. See the SetForegroundWindow documentation for commentary on this and the factors that can let an application come to the foreground (all of the methods you are trying essentially come down to a SetForegroundWindow call).
Note that one of the explicit blocking circumstances is "The foreground process is not a Modern Application or the Start Screen."
This works for you when debugging because "The process is being debugged" is one of the cases which explicitly allows foreground privileges.
Because this is a generally user-unfriendly thing to do there isn't a good general purpose way to bypass this behaviour and steal the foreground.
Likewise, normal apps cannot run on top of Modern applications or the start screen.
You may be better off locking the system by calling the LockWorkStation function.
I searched StackOverflow and it doesn't look like many people are having this problem, but for me, this happens very, very frequently. Maybe not every time, but perhaps every other time.
Once I try to build and run the app, Xcode crashes, and in a strange way: it just disappears with no error messages, no suggestion to report the problem, nothing at all. This happened with Xcode 6.0 as well. It doesn't matter whether I am running the app on a device or on an emulator.
To prevent the crash, I need to Product > Clean. If I do this clean each time before running the app, crashes do not happen, but once I forget to do that, Xcode can crash any moment.
I don't think I ever had this crash with an old project, but it keeps happening with the project that I started in Xcode 6.0.
Because of that, iOS development is becoming for me quite a painful exercise, similar to pre-Android-Studio Android development.
Is it just my problem, or maybe someone else is having it? Maybe someone has a solution?
I just started running into the same issue and found a workaround for it. Found it to be an issue with building when Xcode is full screen. Seems silly, but so far exiting full screen mode has worked for me. I've been able to re-introduce the issue after building full screen a few times, and then instantly fix it again by exiting full screen.
Yeah, it's not that the app is crashing, it's just that the click is triggering the red close window button behind the red button (yeah, seriously). You'll notice, Xcode is still open, it's just that the window has closed. You might also notice that sometimes when you click "stop" in full screen mode, it switches to non full screen. Again, the tap is passing through the run/stop buttons to the underlying window controls.
So dumb.
I solved it using 'cmd + R' instead of clicking the run button
I am making a vim-style "window manager" that takes text input, much like Alfred or Spotlight in Mavericks (in a floating panel).
The problem I'm having is when I call activateWithOptions: on a running application it steals focus from my window. I was hoping the problem would be solved by simply bring my app to the foreground again, however it seems the activation is running on a separate thread, and I end up activating my app before the original app gets activated.
I have tried reactivating when I receive NSWorkspaceDidActivateApplicationNotification, but that doesn't work either.
Ideally I'd like to pause execution until the application is focused for multiple reasons, since that would be the window I manipulate further.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
I have strange situation where my OS X application top menu no longer works and loses all control to the application. For example Command + Quit does not work, file menu does not work etc.
It does not happens always and mostly happens when system goes to sleep for long time or system restarted unexpectedly or app is running for long time like 2-3 days.
I have tried a lot to figure it out but no luck so far so may be i can find help here.
Regards,
MP.