Prevent dialogs appearing in unattended builds - build-process

I was wondering is there is a fool-proof way to run a program on windows such that I'm guaranteed that no interactive dialogs of any kind are displayed.
I've tried the registry ErrorMode hack, calling _CrtSetReportMode(), etc., but they all have holes in them or require you to modify the program.
I need a way to run an arbitrary program and practically force Windows to execute them such that there is no possibility for them to open a window. It is perfectly ok for the program to crash if it attempts to open a window.
Would running the program as a service solve the problem?

I'm not aware of any other ways that might possibly work. Running as a service won't solve the problem either as the dialog will be displayed on the service's desktop, which you generally don't have access to.

You could use a library such as Detours to intercept all calls to functions that might display a dialog box (this might in fact be nearly everything in user32.dll).

Related

When does System.out not appear in the Java console?

I understood that anything to standard out (System.out) would appear in the Java Console window (when it's enabled). I spotted somewhere though that there might be situations where this isn't try, for example, from Swing apps. Is that the case?
Basically, what situations or setups wouldn't I expect to see standard output in the console? Is there a difference in behavior running on the JDK rather than explicitly on the JRE for example? javaw.exe?
ps, I understand how to display the Console in the Java settings but I'm curious as I've managed to create an application, run as an executable jar, that doesn't start the console despite some calls to System.out) on Windows 7.
The only way you wouldn't see System.out output in the console is if the method System.setOut has been invoked. This method is invoked to redirect output to the graphical Java Console, but I don't know of any other realistic circumstance in which it would be redirected away from the Java Console unless you do so voluntarily.
Depending on terminal settings it can happen that the output is not written until a newline character is sent as well. So if you do System.out.print("test") it might not appear immediately.
On Windows this is usually not the case, but on Unix terminals this is quite common.
Perhaps you use javaw to start virtual machine, this version will not show console messages. You can use java to start the virtual machine, which will show the console message.
javaw is intended for apps with windows, java is intended for console apps.
Same thing happened to me. I could not get System.out.println or Logger.debug either on console.
If you are on a huge project in Eclipse or whatever, you can read below.
Solution: I realized that I had not committed jars and some java files to SubVersioN on network. thats all. Project had not been compiled.
One situation I can think of is to invoke System.setOut(null) (orSystem.setOut(any OutputStream other than System.out or System.err)) then the console, if exists, would show nothing.

How to determine cause of DirectX 11 driver hang

I am working on a QT application for which I've integrated DirectX 11 into a custom widget. The application renders a scrolling display - a graphical representation of data being read from a file. The user can speed up and slow down the scrolling speed.
For the most part, this is working great. The DirectX 11 rendering is presented to my custom widget just as I'd expect. The problem is that the graphics driver randomly hangs and crashes my program. I say "random" because I have been testing this with the same data file and it never seems to crash at the same point in the file, after a specific amount of time, or at a specific scrolling speed (the faster the scrolling speed, the more work being done by the GPU per frame).
When the application hangs, my screen freezes for a moment, goes black, then returns with a nice message from NVidia that it has recovered from a driver crash. The Debug Output in Visual Studio contains the following:
D3D11: Removing Device.
D3D11 ERROR: ID3D11Device::RemoveDevice:
Device removal has been triggered for the following reason
(DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG: The Device took an unreasonable amount of
time to execute its commands, or the hardware crashed/hung. As a
result, the TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) mechanism has been
triggered. The current Device Context was executing commands when the
hang occurred. The application may want to respawn and fallback to
less aggressive use of the display hardware). [ EXECUTION ERROR #378:
DEVICE_REMOVAL_PROCESS_AT_FAULT]
I have discovered that by simply commenting out the IDXGISwapChain1::Present call, the application will run through the file at blazing speed. Graphics-wise it is still pushing data to the GPU and drawing to render targets, it just never gets displayed to my window.
What I'm hoping for is help with ideas of what types of things cause driver hangs. My shaders are incredibly simple - basically just positioning my vertices using a projection matrix. And considering what I described in the above paragraph, shaders should still be cranking through vertices and pixels even when Present isn't being called, yes?
I was suspicious that this could be a compatibility issue with Qt - I know DirectX isn't officially supported by Qt. So I tried creating a separate window using CreateWindowEx and using that for my swap chain instead of the custom Qt widget. It rendered to that window but also hung the driver just like before.
I was also suspicious of a driver bug in my laptop, so I tried running the application on a beefier desktop PC that regularly runs another DirectX 11 application (non-Qt) without a hitch (worth mentioning that this other application renders similar data in a scrolling display as well, using shaders that are a lot more complex). But my QT application hangs the driver on that PC as well.
Anyone know of a way I can get a more detailed description of what is causing the driver to hang?
Thank you in advance for any help you can offer.
UPDATE: 2013-08-01 17:16 CST
I am currently investigating a possible thread syncing issue that may be the culprit. Will continue tomorrow morning and post if I solve this on my own.
After some testing today, it appears to have been a threading issue. I have run several times today with no graphics crash. So my problem must be fixed, unless I've just been getting lucky with my tests today (or unlucky, rather - if this shows its ugly face again in a day or two).
I was aware that the immediate device context is not thread safe. Rather than using deferred contexts, though, I was using critical sections to sync my threads and coordinate use of the device context. What I did not realize is that it is not safe to call IDXGISwapChain1::Present while another thread is using the device context. Makes sense, but since it is not call directly from the device context itself, I overlooked it. I literally moved my Present() call a few lines up into my critical section block, and it hasn't given me a crash since.

RadEditor ExportToPDF not generating PDF in client's environment

We are using the Telerik RadEditor control, specifically for it's ability to render a PDF via the ExportToPDF() method on the control. We find that this works great in our development and test environments but fails as soon as we get to our client's environment. What I mean by fails is that typically when you execute the ExportToPDF() method, a dialog box pops up with the name of the PDF file, it's size, and whether you want to open it or save it. In our client's environment that dialog window appears, but the file size does not appear. If you save the file, it's a blank document. The machines / environments are equal in their setup (IIS 6 on Windows server 2003). The only exception is that our client's machine is in a secure environment with no access to the internet.
We are loading form letters into the control and then creating the PDF once the user clicks a button, so I don't think this is being caused by bad data / invalid characters causing the PDF not to generate.
My questions are: does anyone have experience running the ExportToPDF() command in an environment with no access to the internet? Could this be a permissions issue? I can't seem to find documentation on whether the ExportToPDF() functionality uses a temporary directory to write the PDF out to while it's rendering. It may be as simple as that, but I'm having a hard time researching this issue.
I've also put a try / catch block around the ExportToPDF() method and I know it's not throwing any errors.
We are running an older version of RadEditor - 2009.3.1208 - it runs in a large application with other Telerik tools so upgrading the entire RadControl suite is not trivial (b/c of testing, etc) and is taking some time.
Any suggestions on what to try next / has anyone encountered anything like this with this control?
Thanks for your help in advance!
Richard
I doubt that the export functionality needs an active internet connection. Most likely something in your secured environment is blocking silently the export and it does not simply happen. My recommendation is to check the permissions/processes you have on the user machine and test the same outside of the local environment to compare the results.

proliferation of rocket tray icons

Each time I run a test using TestDriven, it creates another "rocket" icon on my system tray. I have to manually do right-click Quit to get rid of them. How can I avoid this?
Check for any open file handles you may be creating in your tests. Depending on the size of your test suite that may be too time consuming and tedious. There's an option to turn off caching the test process between test runs in the options for TestDriven.Net. This seems to be designed for instances like what you're seeing. From their documentation:
Cache test process between test runs
By default the external test process will be cached when the ‘Run Test(s)’ command is used. This process appears in the tool tray as a rocket icon which can be used to kill the process. This is fine unless one of your tests starts leaking leaking native resources (such as leaving open a file handle). The best solution is to fix the resource leak, but you now have to option to work around the issue by killing the test process at the end of each test run. This can be useful if the resource leak is in a 3rd party DLL which can’t be easily be changed.
From here: http://weblogs.asp.net/nunitaddin/archive/2008/12/03/testdriven-net-options-pane.aspx
I realize you asked this a year ago, so you may have already figured out a way to fix the problem. In that case, I would ask that you let us know what you did.

How do I debug server side code in Aptana Jaxer?

I'm trying to debug some server-side JavaScript code running in Aptana Jaxer and I'm not having any success. I haven't even been able to find any tutorials or posts about this issue. Does anyone know if it's possible and if so, what am I missing?
You can set you Jaxer.Config.DEV_MODE = true; to get some error information in your browser.
Also use the Jaxer.Log to debug.
Hope this helps a bit.
Jaxer and Aptana Studio do not yet have the ability to debug remote scripts from the client side. That is, you can't single-step into a callback and have your code window show you the first line of code in the remote method. This is on their wishlist, of course, but it'd be pretty tricky to do well.
Personally, I use logging. Jaxer has strong facilities for this, in Jaxer.Log.*.
A lot of people sneer at "printf() debugging", but the fact is, it works, and it's often less trouble to set up than an interactive debugger, especially for server applications and remote method invocation. You just sprinkle logging messages wherever you want to know the state of the system at that point, then make your app try to do the thing that's failing. Study the logs, rinse, repeat.
tail -f /opt/AptanaJaxer/logs/jaxer.log

Resources