Wait for Process - vb.net

In my application in VB.NET, I have started an application and introduced a wait delay of 20 seconds. But for loading the second application, the time is varying. Is it possible to have a do while loop, similar to the structure as shown below:
Start the application1
do {
sleep(2seconds)
}until(Application1 Window is loaded

Did you look at Process.WaitForInputIdle()? It's waiting until the application has entered a message loop for it's user interface (created a window).
Edit: See the MSDN description on the topic here

The biggest obstacle you're going to face is how the child process communicates that it's ready. Determining if another process's window is loaded is shaky at best. It's much cleaner if you decide on something more definitive
Creating a particular registry key
Writing a value to a predetermined file
Windows Messages
Once you decide on that then it's fairly straight forward loop
Dim span = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(20)
Thread.Sleep(span)
Do While Not IsProcessReady()
Thread.Sleep(span)
Loop
As said before you'll need to pick a mechanism to communicate "loaded" and that becomes your IsProcessReady function

Related

Is there any internal timeout in Microsoft UIAutomation?

I am using the UI Automation COM-to-.NET Adapter to read the contents of the target Google Chrome browser that plays a FLASH content on Windows 7. It works.
I succeeded to get the content and elements. Everything works fine for some time but after few hours the elements become inaccessible.
The (AutomationElement).FindAll() returns 0 children.
Is there any internal undocumented Timeout used by UIAutomation ?
According to this IUIAutomation2 interface
There are 2 timeouts but they are not accessible from IUIAutomation interface.
IUIAutomation2 is supported only on Windows 8 (desktop apps only).
So I believe there is some timeout.
I made a workaround that restarts the searching and monitoring of elements from the beginning of the desktop tree but the elements are still not available.
After some time (not sure how much) the elements are available again.
My requirements are to read the values all the time as fast as possible but this behavior makes a damage to the whole architecture.
I read somewhere that there is some timeout of 3 minutes but not sure.
if there is a timeout, is it possible to change it ?
Is it possible to restart something or release/dispose something ?
I can't find anything on MSDN.
Does anybody have any idea what is happening and how to resolve ?
Thanks for this nicely put question. I have a similar issue with a much different setup. I'm on Win7, using UIAutomationCore.dll directly from C# to test our application-under-development. After running my sequence of actions & event subscriptions and all the other things, I intermittently observe that the UIA interface stops working (about 8-10min in my case, but I'm heavily using the UIA interface).
Many different things including dispatching the COM interface, sleeping at different places failed. The funny revelation was I managed to use the AccEvent.exe (part of SDK like inspect.exe) during the test and saw that events also stopped flowing to AccEvent, too. So it wasn't my client's interface that stopped, but it was rather the COM-server (or whatever the UIAutomationCore does) that stopped responding.
As a solution (that seems to work most of the time - or improve the situation a lot), I decided I should give the application-under-test some breathing point, since using the UIA puts additional load on it. This could be a smartly-put sleep points in your client, but instead of sleeping a set time, I'm monitoring the processor load of the application and waiting until it settles down.
One of the intermittent errors I receive when the problem manifests itself is "... was unable to call any of the subscribers..", and my search resulted in an msdn page saying they have improved things on CUIAutomation8 interface, but as this is Windows8 specific, I didn't have the chance to try that yet.
I should also add that I also reduced the number of calls to UIA by incorporating more ui caching (FindAllBuildCache), as the less the frequency of back-and-forth the better it is for the uia. Thanks to the answer of Guy in another question: UI Automation events stop being received after a while monitoring an application and then restart after some time

NotesTimer causes the whole lotus client to flicker

I have a timer that talks to java objects through LS2J. It has only to call some getters of the java objects and to update the GUI with new values. This causes the GUI in iNotes Client to show the "Busy" cursor very shortly when the timer ticks. I is really annoying because it occurs even when another window is open and even in the designer.
I actually have to expect that the functionality in the timer event will get more complicated in the future, so I don't want to solve the problem by making my handler lighter.
Is there a way to tell iNotes client not to show this cursor or even an alternative way to make this regular check without timers?
The NotesTimer class in Notes client (not iNotes) does take over the foreground when it triggers, so there will be a bit of a delay if you do something that takes time to execute. It's possible to set up the Notes client to execute background scheduled agents in local database replicas, so that might be an option. You can to the heavy lifting in background and deposit the results somewhere -- say, in a profile document -- that can be accessed quickly by the UI code.
Alternately, you could try a XPages in the client application. I believe it can do partial refreshes while other stuff is going on.
For the record, I simplified the functionality of the Java call by preparing the data so that the timer only has to read the results. I also made the timer run every 3 seconds instead of 1.
Now I don't see any flicker!

Inform user about progress while UI is blocked

Subject sounds mutually exclusive, and this is probably a terrible hack, but I'll ask anyway.
I have an single-threaded VB.NET application which is setting status bar label to "Loading..." and then synchronously loading data from database which in some cases can take up to 1-2 minutes. Is there any way to show user an AJAX-type animation while data is being loaded? Of course, the correct way is to use separate thread/BackgroundWorker for data access and manage UI separately, but I can't currently change data access model and have been asked for a "temporary fix".
Here are some of my ideas at the moment:
Update label (and only that single label) from another thread, force it's redraw, somehow circumventing windows forms message pump (probably not possible)
Keep another process in background and send "show" message to it from main application. It shows up in front of application, shows animation until "hide" message from main application is received. (problems with user switching away from main application but "animation" form still visible)
I'll probably get down voted for suggesting it (and quite frankly I don't blame people) but this sounds like a job for DoEvents.
I wouldn't normally suggest it, but you are looking for a hack.

Desing pattern for background working app

I have created a web-service app and i want to populate my view controllers according to the response i fetch(via GET) in main thread. But i want to create a scheduled timer which will go and control my server, if there becomes any difference(let's say if the count of an array has changed) i will create a local notification. As far as i read from here and some google results, i cant run my app in background more then ten minutes expect from some special situations(Audio, Vo-IP, GPS).. But i need to control the server at least one per minute.. Can anyone offer some idea-or link please?
EDIT
I will not sell the app in store, just for a local area network. Let's say, from the server i will send some text messages to the users and if a new message comes, the count of messages array will increment, in this situation i will create a notification. I need to keep this 'controlling' routing alive forever, whether in foreground or background. Does GCD give such a solution do anyone have any idea?
Just simply play a mute audio file in loop in the background, OR, ping the user's location in the background. Yes, that will drain the battery a bit, but it's a simple hack for in-home applications. Just remember to enable the background types in your Info.plist!
Note: "[...] I fetch (via GET) in main thread." This is not a good approach. You should never fetch any network resources on the main thread. Why? Because your GUI, which is maintained by the main thread, will become unresponsive whenever a fetch isn't instantaneous. Any lag spike on the network results in a less than desirable user experience.
Answer: Aside from the listed special situations, you can't run background apps. The way I see it:
Don't put the app in the background. (crappy solution)
Try putting another "entity" between the app and the "server". I don't know why you "need to control the server at least one per minute" but perhaps you can delegate this "control" to another process outside the device?
.
iOS app -> some form of proxy server -> server which requires
"babysitting" every minute.

To find the process running in task manager and to kill the process

I have a windows mobile application
I have noticed that it properly terminate on exiting, they simply minimize and take up memory. I need to cehck whether any instance of the same application is running in the taskmanager.If exists, i need to kill the process.
I need to write small app that would loop through all open application processes and terminate the required one.
Does such an application exist? If not, which onecould I use to write my own app for it?
Typically this is not how you solve this problem.
You should hold a 'mutex' in your application, and when it launches a second time, you first check this mutex, and if it's taken, you know your app is already running.
Find an appropriate global mutex to hold, and then check for it (I'm not sure what sort you can use on whatever version of Windows Mobile you are targetting, but a trivial search should help you find the answer).
If your app shows an [X] in the corner that's a Minimize button. Change the MinimizeButton property of the form and it will become an [ok] button which will close it.
The CF under Windows Mobile already enforces application singleton behavior. If the app is already running, the CF will look for it, find it, and bring it to the fore for you. No extra work needed.
If you really want to find the process and terminate it, that's done with the toolhelp API set. You can P/Invoke it or use the classes in the Smart Device Framework.