I have a desktop (XP) application and a CE app (Motorola MC9090) and I want to Scan few Barcodes with Motorola and then send the text to the application on PC using WiFi. I have no idea how to do it - any suggestions? (VB.NET preferred)
Think about it logically, and try simplifying this a little;
If you want to do it over WiFi, you're going to need "something" on the device to scan and send, as well as something on a "server" to receive, such as a webservice; so you actually need to write two things.
A simple option would be to put together a simple ASP.Net webservice for receiving the data (and processing it, dealing with authentication, etc.).
You can then write an application for your CE device that interacts with said webservice and handles the user interaction (most scanners will fake key presses into the control with focus). Bear in mind, that you might also need to cope with situations when the WiFi is out of range.
If you're targetting Windows CE, you cannot do it in Visual Studio 2010 or later (as far as I'm aware), so you may need to get hold of VS 2008 (to maximise your support lifecycle)
Related
My background is that I have been supporting a Vb5 application which controls my customers equipment in real time. He is now developing a new control board which will be connected to the PC via USB.
As I understand it connecting the device will generate a Com port. At the same time we will upgrade to VB.net, which is new to me.
I have Visual studio 2015 Community edition. I have written a routine using GetPortnames to ascertain how many com ports there are and what numbers (COM4, etc) they have.
How do I find what USB devices, if any, are attached to the com ports together with any identifying data of the device?
Already answered, next time please google first.
The key word that I type in google was: vb usb
Link
I develop a few tools in C# using the .Net framework and I am considering the move to Mono. Based on the compatibility analyzer tool (MOMA), the only compatibility issue is the licensing code:
I use Window's serial number and a few other things to generate a computer ID which I then use to generate and manage my licenses.
Obviously, Windows will not be available on Linux or Mac, so I need another way to generate a computer ID.
What can I use in mono to create a reasonably reliable computer ID?
Use a MAC Address:
Get MAC Address in linux using mono
That should be unique to a given network interface, which would uniquely identify the machine.
Also, see this thread discussing the pitfalls and issues related to DRM in mono.
You can use a combination of either CPUID and a hard drive serial number.
As for your code, there is not going to be an elegant way to do this with a one-liner. You will have to check which platform you are running on via Environment.OSVersion. And then based on that, branch your code to do system-specific access. For example, to get CPUID/hdd serial number, use a WMI query; or parse the output of hdparm -I /dev/hda and go from there.
You could use a portion of how Microsoft checked hardware for Windows XP activation. They checked 10 items
Display Adapter
SCSI Adapter
IDE Adapter (effectively the motherboard)
Network Adapter (NIC) and its MAC Address
RAM Amount Range (i.e., 0-64mb, 64-128mb, etc.)
Processor Type
Processor Serial Number
Hard Drive Device
Hard Drive Volume Serial Number (VSN)
CD-ROM / CD-RW / DVD-ROM
When XP was (re)installed/activated it'd contact their servers and if 7 or more of the above items were unchanged it would activate without the need to speak with anyone.
I, personally, would recommend against using the MAC address. As you mentioned, it can be easily changed. Additionally, most machines have two or more network cards now (wired and wireless). It gets worse with virtualization as the MAC can be changed even more easily than the physical one can (do you license differently for virtual environments?)
Another option, instead of checking all 10 hardware components, is to use the UUID of the root file system. The downside of this, is that if the drive ever has issues, the license needs to be reacquired.
sudo blkid
/dev/sda1: TYPE="ntfs" UUID="72C0DE8EC0DE57C5" LABEL="windows"
/dev/sda2: UUID="30fcb748-ad1e-4228-af2f-951e8e7b56df" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda5: TYPE="swap" UUID="8c4e69f8-5074-42c0-8134-0b2429c4c02c"
/dev/sdb1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="4848-E35A" TYPE="vfat"
I have built my own USB HID device. I want to check, if it is working correctly.
I want to check the descriptors sent by the device, display input reports and send output reports. What tools are capable of this task and runs on Windows 7 64 bit?
On a day-to-day basis I use USBlyzer. It works well on Windows 7 64-bit.
As far as free tools go, the Windows DDK includes (in C:\winddk\7600.16385.1\tools\avstream\amd64) a tool called UVCview.exe ("USB device viewer") that shows at least some descriptor information.
You might also try Wireshark, but I admit, I only use it for network and can't speak to the quality of its USB capture.
(even though it's an old post) - here is a convenient and free solution:
Our Docklight Scripting software can test custom USB HID devices in the free (evaluation) download already, no time limit. Tested both on Windows 7 and Windows 10. You can access your device via the chosen VID and PID, display input report data and send output reports, even with variable output report ids.
I wrote a few iPhone apps using Core Data for persistent storage. Everything is working great but I would like to add the ability for users to back up their data to a PC (via WiFi to a PC app) or to a web server.
This is new to me and I can't seem to figure out where to begin researching the problem. I don't want to overcomplicate the issue if there is an easy way to implement this.
Is anyone familiar enough with what I am looking to do to point me in the right direction or give me a high level overview of what I should be considering?
The data is all text and would be perfectly stored in .csv files if that matters.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a good all-purpose solution under the current SDK. Here are some ideas:
If you only want backup, you could just back up the whole sqlite file to the server or over wifi, but you then can't really use it with anything other than Core Data (and you might even run into trouble with iPhone-Mac compatibility, e.g. between 32-bit and 64-bit types).
A very robust solution would be to implement cloud storage with a REST API and sync the iPhone and desktop app to the server (this is what the Evernote app does, for instance), but that is obviously much more work.
You could also manually convert your data to a .csv and send that to the server or desktop, but parsing it could be problematic (and you'd have to worry about the data getting corrupted). If you did want to go that route, here is a tutorial.
I'm writing managed code that has to interact with a vendor's COM automation server that runs out of process. I have found that this server becomes unstable if more than one client connects to it. For example, if I have managed code in process A and managed code in process B both connecting to this COM server, a single process will be spun up for the COM server and it's behavior is less than reliable. I'm hoping there's a way to force a separate process for each client - server connection. Ideally, I'd like to end up with:
Managed Process A talking to COM Server in process C1
Managed Process B talking to COM Server in process C2
One thought that came to mind was that if I ran process A and process B with different security identities, that that might cause the COM infrastructure to create separate server processes. I'd rather not go down that road, however. Managed Process A and Managed Process B are actually Windows Services. And I'm running them with identity Local System (because I need them to be able to interact with the desktop, and you can't check the "Interact with Desktop" box on the services applet for services that don't run as Local System). And the reason I need to interact with desktop is that this COM server occasionally throws up a dialog box on the screen and if the service itself cannot interact with the desktop then the COM server is spawns can't display the dialog (I believe it is displayed on a hidden WinStation).
Place the component registered at COM+, this put an isolation layer at your.
Use : Control Panel->Administrative Tools
or cmd/execute DCOMCNFG
Component Services->Computers->My Computer->COM+ Application, right click, new application, next, Create an empty application, enter app name “COM+ your.dll”, next, select Local Service, next, next, next, finish.
In new item made, expand, at Components, right click, new component, next, select Install new component, select your component.
Click Component properties, tab Identity, select System Account.
For errors in calls see Event after.
It's been a while since I've done this, so my memory is hazy.
If you configure the OOP COM server as a DCOM server using the DCOM config tool, I believe you can specify the isolation level. I did this years ago with a non-threadsafe in-process DLL that needed to be accessed in a threadsafe fashion from IIS and it worked a charm.
Let me know if it works for you :)
Your best bet would be to get the vendor to fix the component. After all, if it won't handle multiple clients, there could be other bugs lurking. If you can't do this, there are some other things to try.
With in-process COM objects I've had occassion to manually load the dll and access the interfaces directly without going through COM.
I haven't done this myself with out-of-process COM, but there are some things you could try. Ultimately the library is just a process sitting there receiving messages which invoke functions.
You might be able to manually start the a new copy of the process for each client and then send it messages. You may run into some hiccups with this. For example, the process may check to see if it's already running and refuse to start or otherwise be unhappy.
If you have a known upper limit on the number of clients, another approach you could consider would be to make multiple copies of the original .exe file and then use binary patching (something similar to the detours library from Microsoft Research) to override the COM registration functions and register each copy as a separate COM object.