ShowWin

Sometimes you may need to display a small window to inform the user about what is going on. Although the scripting tools MortScript and nScript provide functions to show dialogs they can not show simple information windows.

ShowWin default colors

ShowWin with a progress bar

ShowWin is nothing special but a nearly full configurable window to be used from cmd line tools. It just uses Win32 API calls, constants and structures as FindWindow, PostMessage, SendMessage, WM_COPYDATA, COPYDATASTRUCT, GetSystemMetrics, GetDesktopWindow, GetWindowRect, CreateWindowEx, ShowWindow, UpdateWindow, INITCOMMONCONTROLSEX, GetDeviceCaps, CreateFontIndirect, GetWindowDC, ReleaseDC, PROGRESS_CLASS, InvalidateRect, BeginPaint, CreatePen, SelectObject, Rectangle, SetBkMode, DrawText, EndPaint, SetTextColor, DeleteObject, GetKeyState and PostQuitMessage.

Basic WIN32 programming

Possibly you never wrote a native C windows application. Come on and dive into the basics. It is always good to know the basics even if one writes DotNet or JAVA code.

Supported arguments

 showWin -t "Text zum Anzeigen" -r 90 -g 80 -b 70 -s 8 -w 200 -h 50 -x 0 -y 0 -rt 200 -gt 20 -bt 20 -ti 10 -progr 30 -align left

 ARGS: 
 option/parameter:                meaning:                default:            limitations:
 -t "Text zum Anzeigen"           text to show            "Installing"        255 chars, no " inside, no line breaks, no tabs
 -r 90                            background color RED    255                    0-255
 -g 80                            background color GREEN    207                    0-255
 -b 70                            background color BLUE    0                    0-255
 -s 8                             font size in points        10                    7-24 points
 -w 200                           window width pixels        460                    100-screenwidth
 -h 50                            window height pixels    40                    menu bar height (ie 26pixels)
 -x 60                            window pos X            12                    0 + system window bordersize
 -y 60                            window pos Y            48                    0 + system taskbar bar height. Using 0;0 does not work nice on WM, win may be below taskbar
 -rt 200                          text color RED            0                    0-255
 -gt 20                           text color GREEN        0                    0-255
 -bt 20                           text color BLUE            0                    0-255

 -align center                    text alignment            left                center|left|right

 -ti 10                           timeout to autoclose    0                    no autoclose, min: 1 (second), max: 3600 = one hour

 -progr 10                        show with progress val    0                    no progressbar, max: 100
                                  the progressbar is appended at bottom of textwindow
 -prval                           update progress bar value                    no default, min=1, max=100

 -kill                            kill existing window, exit app

 -m "new message text"            replace text in window                        see -t

Continue reading ‘Mobile development: show a small information window using WIN32 API’ »

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Continue reading ‘Mobile Development: Watch the power of your device, think green’ »

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