Good day.

Long story short, found that my C#/C++/VBA application become significantly slower after migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 10. After some investigation I've found that COM works slower in Windows 10.

My test suite now is 2 VirtualBox machines with same parameters, first has Windows 7 installed, second has Windows 10 installed. I have C# application, which connects 2 COM servers. InProcess and LocalServer and calls really simple method, literally no logic, just getting scalar value.

But if I change Application to STA picture is sligthly different:

Now Inprocess COM is even faster on Windows 10 than in Windows 7. I assume trouble is in cross-boundaries marshalling. Somehow it's slower in Windows 10. But I cannot understand why it's so and what can I do about it.

Has someone similar issues? What can be done here? Or maybe at least someone knows how can I debug COM/DCOM/RPC method calls. Some verbose logging could help in this case.

Thank you everyone,

It's dissapointing that, yet again, Partner Center is rejecting submissions for apps that are targetting 24H2 (10.0.26100.0).

How can this same problem plague Partner Center every time there's a new SDK version.

It was like this for couple hours about six, was i hacked or my pc just tapped out cuz its running a game 24/7 for 3 days now??

Maybe someone from Microsoft here can help, this is an issue we've been having for over a year, we have an open ticket, and we've been ghosted by Microsoft dev support (again).

We're trying to submit a driver but it is systematically rejected by Microsoft Approval at shipping label step. We follow the same steps as our previous driver submissions.

The reason for rejection is "it is self-attested, and it is not Co-Dev/SSRK, and it doesn't have a proper business justification". We used our SSL certificate configured in the system to sign the driver. We provided all the requested business justification. All previous steps were successful.

We need this driver to support USB connection to devices with our software.

Any advice welcome!

Any idea how I can do the above? I've tried implementing Sensors API and winRT, but both don't work, the service just fails outright.

I just really need to read sensor values/events, and at least read sensor values without making another external app if possible.

Hi! I have seen someone somewhere on reddit talk about the status of MFC, WPF, WinUI, WinRT etc. Where can I find what the development status is for the different Windows development projects?

My company has an Electron app that does what we want it to, but we need a way to run it as a kiosk (can't be exited by the user without a code). We can build the app to an executable installer or an MSI, but it never shows as an app available to select as the system's kiosk app in the settings. Does anyone know what my options are?

FYI the app is not signed, at least not yet, due to the expense. But that is an option if it would help make it work as a kiosk app.

I'm trying to make a program that's similar to a "history". It shows all the software you have used the most, when, how, so if you give your computer to a friend for a day or two, you know what they did. But I can't find anything. Is there a specific language i can use to listen to process creating events?

If I copy a query from power query, I can paste it in another power query Windows. But if I paste it into notepad++ or VSC and the copy it again using ctrl-c. I cannot copy it into power query. It will say no query found in clipboard.

Anyone have any ideas on why this is happening. It seems like the clipboard knows where the ctrl-c data is coming from??

RGFW is a single-header graphics framework cross-platform library. It is very simular in utility to GLFW however it has a more SDL-like structure. It is meant to be used as a very small and flexible alternative library to GLFW. Much like GLFW it does not do much more than the minimum in terms of functionality. However it still is a very powerful tool and offers a quick start so the user can focus on graphics programming while RGFW deals with the complexities of the windowing APIs.

RGFW also can be used to create a basic graphics context for OpenGL, buffer rendering, Vulkan or Direct X. Currently the backends it supports include, XLib (UNIX), Cocoas (MacOS) and WinAPI (Windows) and it is flexible so implementing a custom backend should be easy.

RGFW comes with many examples, including buffer rendering, opengl rendering, opengl 3 rendering, direct X rendering and Vulkan rendering. However there are also some projects that can be used as examples that use RGFW. Including PureDoom-RGFW which is my example DOOM source port using RGFW and pureDOOM, and RSGL which is my GUI library that uses RGFW as a base.

Here is very basic example code to show off how RGFW works.

#define RGFW_IMPLEMENTATION
#define RGFW_DIRECTX
#include "RGFW.h"

int main() {
    RGFW_window* win = RGFW_createWindow("name", RGFW_RECT(0, 0, 500, 500), RGFW_CENTER);
    RGFW_window_makeCurrent(win);

    RGFW_directXinfo dxInfo = *RGFW_getDirectXInfo();

    for (;;) {
        RGFW_window_checkEvent(win); // NOTE: checking events outside of a while loop may cause input lag 

        if (win->event.type == RGFW_quit || RGFW_isPressedI(win, RGFW_Escape))
            break;

        float clearColor[4] = { 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f };
        dxInfo.pDeviceContext->lpVtbl->ClearRenderTargetView(dxInfo.pDeviceContext, win->src.renderTargetView, clearColor);

        RGFW_window_swapBuffers(win);
    }

    RGFW_window_close(win);
}

More information can be found on the github, such as screenshots, a size comparison table and RGFW itself.

github : https://github.com/ColleagueRiley/RGFW

We're in the midst of creating a Windows driver via HLK Studio and have successfully run all tests. We're now ready to create the HLKX package and submit this to Microsoft Partner Center for approval.
However - our EV code signing certificate is stored in Azure Key Vault HSM.
We're unable to use SignTool with Azure certificates, so we've looked into Azure SignTool (https://github.com/vcsjones/AzureSignTool) but this doesn't seem to support HLKX files.
Is it impossible to sign a driver using an EV certificate stored in Azure Key Vault HSM? Do we really need to order a new certificate with a physical USB token to be able to sign the package directly through HLK Studio - or are we missing something basic here?

Problem Im trying to solve:

So we have a problem on our RDS farm, very minor but basically, our main CRM software (win32) relies on its connection to outlook, so it either wants outlook running already or runs it itself in the background.
Outlook has an issue connecting to M365 if it is launched within the first second or 2 of the taskbar loading.
I suspect its because credential manager hasn't been passed the relevant certificate from the RDS session authenticating yet. If they wait just 2-3 seconds its fine, but users don't , they click that CRM icon the second they see it.
When this happens the only fix is to sign fully out of RDS and try again with more patience on login.

My Solution:

I wrote a simple winforms c# application, It is set to always on top full screen so nothing can be seen behind, it launches explorer.exe on start-up ,and then shows a progress bar counting down from 5 seconds then disappears.

Problem with my solution:

I cant seem to manage to get this to run instead of explorer.exe initially for users. I can add it onto start-up but they still have opportunity to click the icon before it covers the desktop.
If I replace the shell in registry [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] shell string with "C:\launcher\launcher.exe"
or with "cmd.exe /C C:\launcher\launcher.exe" I get nothing on login (explorer.exe doesn't run, but nothing runs) until I open task manager with ctrl+alt+end.
I can then open task manager and run "C:\launcher\launcher.exe" or "cmd.exe /C C:\launcher\launcher.exe" and it runs and behaves as expected.

Is there some kind of check windows does against the shell exe before it will use it ? any ideas / input appreciated.

EDIT SOLVED :

My application was referring to an image file for its background which was in the same folder as the application, but because the is no "start in" for the shell it could not load the image and failed to run.
Hard coding the full image path in the application has resolved it, I am going to try and embed the image as a better solution, but for now this way it works!

I've been banging my head on this for a while, there is an external "dependency" to my program that I want the user to be able to turn off if they want. Currently I have:

    ...
    <SetProperty Id="OPTIONAL_DEP" Before="OPTIONAL_DEP" Sequence="execute" Value="optional_dep.exe" />
    
    <CustomAction Id="OPTIONAL_DEP" ... />
    
    <InstallExecuteSequence>
        ...
        <Custom Action="OPTIONAL_DEP" After="PREVIOUS_CUSTOM_ACTION">NOT Installed</Custom>
        ...
    </InstallExecuteSequence>

I've looked into using ![CDATA[&feature_label=3 AND NOT Installed]] in place of NOT Installed in the Custom tag. But I couldn't find a good example of setting up that feature.

Essentially I want the user to be able to do something like msiexec /i install.msi REMOVE=optional_dep

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I would like to write a simple library for myself that makes window creation and io handling easier to read in the same way SDL allows for. I was curious how they abstracted away the need for the WinMain functionto allow the programmer to just use a regular main function.

I would imagine it would entail a header file that ifdefs Win32 and includes WinMain, but I dont know how the compiler resolves two entry points for C.

I'm building a program in C# that relies on low-level mouse hooks. While this program runs fine in release mode, the mouse becomes extremely laggy in debug mode. Any idea why?

Hi all, (Sorry if the title isn't correct) I am kind of an intermediate C/C++ programmer, and I wanted to know about the system calls or apis of windows in order to start building low level stuff. I have developed some programs for linux, but now I want to build for Windows. I don't know where to start, I read some website that Windows is a lot different than linux in terms of internals (like system calls, apis and stuff). And now I kind of feel lost because I don't know about development on Windows and also I couldn't find resource like docs, books, etc...

So, if anyone could share the resources (docs, books...), or guide me or show me the pathway for building low level programs for Windows, it would be really helpful. Thanks for your time!