When I try to use Morae Manager 3.0 to run a Screen Text search on a recording of our prototype (coded in WPF, .NET version 3.5 SP1), the only things that come up are the window titles. We are using Windows XP.
Even when I search for something that is editable, like text typed into a text box, it does not come up.
Screen text for things outside the prototype (e.g. desktop icons) still comes up perfectly.
I contacted TechSmith support on two separate occassions and both times the reply I got was it must be an issue with our technology, since the screen text search does work for other things, and that the support people are not developers and thus do not know what might be causing this.
Does anyone know:
what precisely might be causing this -- e.g. does WPF's rendering engine bypass some sort of Windows layer where Morae looks for text (please forgive me for any errors in terminology)
if there is anything I can tweak in the prototype to fix it
how I can get through to someone at TechSmith who knows the answers to 1. and 2.
P.S. Morae is a wonderful product and we've usually had great support from TechSmith. We are only having problems with this one little thing, and one can hardly blame Morae for not being compatible with something as new as WPF.
I have no idea what Morae is or how it works, but one big difference between WPF and for example WinForms is the following, copied from here:
When you create a WPF Window, WPF
creates a top-level HWND, and uses an
HwndSource to put the Window and its
WPF content inside the HWND. The rest
of your WPF content in the application
shares that singular HWND.
If Morae depends on HWNDs to find texts on the screen, this could explain why it can not find the text box. In contrast, i believe in WinForms every control (button, textbox) has its own HWND.
Related
I read that WPF uses DirectX under the hood to perform its rendering, that it doesn't rely on the dinosaurian libraries that WinForms uses to render controls.
So I made my Presentation layer with WPF and it looks the way it should under Win8.
Then I deployed the project to Windows Server 2003... to find out that my nice little custom message box looks awfully WinForms-like and somewhat clunky; the button controls are VERY similar to the WinForms ones, the expander control is no longer shown as a circled ^ arrow and looks like it was drawn in 1998 (picture the ^ arrow on an ugly square flat button that pops up when your mouse hovers over it).
From the Pro WPF in C# 2010 Bible:
Part of the promise of WPF is that you don't need to worry about the details and idiosyncrasies of specific hardware. WPF is intelligent enough to use hardware optimizations where possible, but it has a software fallback for everything. So if you run a WPF application on a computer with a legacy video card, the interface will still appear the way you designed it.
So, is this a lie? To me it is, because it doesn't appear the way I designed it.
If not, then why/how doesn't the thing render identically regardless of the machine that's running it? Is the software fallback somehow designed to mimick Win32/GDI rendering? Is there a way to get my little custom message box to look identical on Win8 and WinServer2K3?
That has NOTHING to do with DirectX / Rendering / video card / any of that.
and EVERYTHING to do with WPF taking the DEFAULT appearance of ALL UI Elements from the Windows Theme.
If you don't want this behavior, you'll have to provide Styles and Templates for ALL UI element types, or otherwise find a way to include PresentationFramework.Aero.dll in your application and use that as the default theme library.
Take a look at this answer
I'm creating a training lab for a desktop application.
Basically it'll be a series of screenshots with hotspots, when the user clicks in the right spot it advances to the next screenshot. There will also be some simple text input, so a textbox will need be overlaid over some of the screenshots. The logic is simply if the user enters the right thing they get to move to the next screen.
Adobe Captivate or good old timeline-based Flash is great for creating stuff like this. But this project has to be Silverlight. I considered using Captivate along with a swf to silverlight converter, but I believe those converters only support animations not logic.
The question is: what is the easiest way to create this type of thing in Silverlight? Can Expression Blend do it? Other alternatives? Ideally little programming is required.
Blend is great for this, you may also want to try using Sketchflow to prototype it quickly http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/SketchFlow_OverView.aspx
Using Expression Blend's behaviours and storyboards makes it easy to create an application with no code in no time.
I'm learning Chinese at the moment and I have gotten my hand on a Chinese dictionary definition.
Now I would like to make an interface.
All I really want the application to do is when I point my mouse pointer over any text on the screen (in any window), it would identify the text I am pointing at and then display a small form over it, which would the chinese transaction.
Is that possible to do? Can WinForms apps interact with windows outside of it's own application?
In C# you can get text under mouse cursor by P/Invoking
GetCursorPos
GetClassName
SendMessage
WM_GETTEXT
WM_GETTEXTLENGTH
WindowFromPoint
Like mentioned here
here is another example in C++
A WinForms application can interact with the Windows of other applications. Window handles exist in a global namespace so if you can get the handle of another application's window you can send it messages. You will have to use pinvoke to do some of this, have a look at WindowFromPoint
However, there is no standardized way to display text in a window; there are dozens of APIs for displaying text. So when you point at text with a mouse, you can only get the pixels, but not necessarily the text.
Some window classes will allow you to send class-specific messages query for the text at a specific location, but many will not. Your best bet is probably to use the same methods that screen readers for the blind use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader
I just bought a touchpad wich allows drawing and using multitouch. The api is not supported fully by windows 7, so I have to rely on the build in config dialog.
The basic features are working, so if I draw something in my WPF tool, and use both fingers to do a right click, I can e.g. change the color. What I want to do now is assign other functions to special features in WPF.
Does anybody know how to find out in what way the pad communicates with the app? It works e.g. in Firefox to scroll, like it should (shown on this photo). But I do not know how to hookup the scroll event, I tried a Scrollviewer (which ignores my scroll attempts) and I also hooked up an event with the keypressed, but it does not fire (I assume the pad does not "press a key" but somehow sends the "scroll" command direclty. How can I catch that command in WPF?
Thanks a lot,
Chris
[EDIT] I got the scroll to work, but only up and down, not left and right. It was just a stupid "listbox in scrollviewer" mistake. But still not sure about commands like ZOOM in (which is working even in paint).. Which API contains such things?
[EDIT2] Funny, the zoom works in Firefox, the horizontal scrolling does not. But, in paint, the horizontal scrolling works...
[EDIT 3] Just asked in the wacom forum, lets see about vendor support reaction time...
http://forum.wacom.eu/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1939
Here is a picture of the config surface to get the idea what I am talking about: (Bamboo settings, I try to catch these commands in WPF)
alt text http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/3751/20091008210914.jpg
Have you had a look at this yet.
WPF 3.5 does not natively support multi-touch (it is coming in WPF 4.0) however the samples in that kit should get you started using the Windows7 Integration Library which access the native Win32 APIs to provide the required support (Don't worry its not real ugly:).
I’m trying to run Google earth inside WPF but I don’t know how. Basically I have managed to run Google Earth in a Windows Form Control inside a Windows Form, everything was OK.
Trying to do the same thing in WPF, well, give strange result a small Google Earth screen placed anywhere in the form an not inside the User Control I have created, and there is now way to make this Google Earth Control grow, or shrink, when I grow or shrink the WPF Form.
Any help would be appreciated, I really mean any!
If you have a Windows Forms control that already works exactly as you want, you could always use WindowsFormsHost to put that control on your WPF form. That might be the easiest thing to do... or is that what you're already doing that isn't working?
I also wrote an application that placed Google Earth inside a WinForms WebBrowserControl that was based on the more-or-less official example hosted by Google. It worked fine. I struggled to recreate the same application inside a WPF WebBrowserControl. My experience confirms what appears to be the general consensus that the WPF WebBrowserControl is harder to use because it provides less control. (e.g. With the WinForms WebBrowserControl you can use the properties to remove the scroll bar and eliminate the IE security question on startup, but with WPF WebBrowserControl you have to use kludges inside to HTML file loaded to get the same effect.) If you are following the Google GE plugin WinForms example, you have to move the JavaScript callback functions into a separate class because of WPF window cant be a parent of the .Net-COM interop between JavaScript and C#. Maybe the other artifacts you described are due to how you resolved this latter limitation. Before finding this solution, I was tempted to put the WinForms WebBrowser control inside the WPF window, but others have posted of unpleasing side-effects of doing this.