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69 lines
3.1 KiB
Text
69 lines
3.1 KiB
Text
Rufus: The Reliable USB Formatting Utility - Commandline hogger
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# Description
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This little utility is intended to solve the issue of Windows applications not
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being able to be BOTH console and GUI [1], leading to all kind of annoyances [2].
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The basic problem is as follows:
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1. You have an awesome Windows UI application that you want your users to be
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able to start from the commandline (to provide parameters, etc.)
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2. If an application is set to operate in UI mode, then when you launch it from
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the command line, you will NOT get a command prompt freeze until it exits, as
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you'd expect from any console app, but instead the prompt will return to the
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user right away.
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3. This means that any message that you try to output from your app to the
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console will appear as ugly as:
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C:\Some\Directory> Some Application Message
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4. Another unfortunate effect is that, when users exit your app, they might
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continue to wait for the prompt to come back, when it is already available
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whilst polluted by output that looks out of place => Your user experience is
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now subpar...
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5. To compensate for this, you might try to be (somewhat) clever, through the
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simulating an <Enter> keypress when your app exit, but lo and behold, soon
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enough you start receiving complaints left and right from Far Manager [3]
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users, due to the fact that this application uses the <Enter> keypress as an
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"I want to launch the currently selected app" event.
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6. HEY, MICROSOFT, THIS SUPER-SUCKS!!!!
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# Primer
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So, how far do we need to go to address this?
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1. We'll create a console hogger application, that does just what you'd expect
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a regular commandline app to do (hog the console prompt until the app exits)
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and wait for a signal (Mutex) from the UI app to indicate that it is closed.
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2. We'll embed this console hogger as a resource in our app, to be extracted
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and run in the current directory whenever we detect that our UI app has
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been launched from the commandline
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3. Because we want this annoyance to have the least impact possible, we'll
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make sure that it is AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE, by writing it in pure assembly
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so that we can compile it with NASM and linking it with WDK, leaving us
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with a 2 KB executable (that will further be compressed to about 1/4th of
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this size through UPX/LZMA).
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# Drawbacks
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The one annoyance with this workaround is that our 'hogger' will appear in the
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command history (doskey). This means that when when a user wants to navigate
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back to the command they launched, they need to skip through an extra entry,
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which they probably have no idea about. And of course, doskey does not provide
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the ability to suppress this last entry.
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Oh, and you also need to release the mutex so that you can delete the file
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before you exit, though that's not a big deal...
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# Compilation
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; From a WDK command prompt
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nasm -fwin32 hogger.asm
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link /subsystem:console /nodefaultlib /entry:main hogger.obj %SDK_LIB_DEST%\i386\kernel32.lib
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# Links
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[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/01/9259142.aspx
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[2] https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/issues/161
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[3] http://www.farmanager.com/
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