use Perl

• Do you even need a toolkit? (Score:2)

  by bart (450)

  As you said

  periodically pop up alerts on my machine

  do you even need a GUI toolkit? It seems to me like a plain MessageBox [microsoft.com] API call is all you need.

  That is, unless you want the script to continue running while the message is shown. In that case, you could set up a simple window with The GUI Loft [darserman.com]. Oldie, but probably good enough.

  And I've never seen a service with a GUI, I'm not sure if it will behave nicely.
  • Re:Do you even need a toolkit? (Score:2)

    by bart (450) <bart.lateur@pandora.be> on 2010.06.23 4:51 (#72107) Journal

    I said

    And I've never seen a service with a GUI, I'm not sure if it will behave nicely.

    and today I found this blog post: Do you still use the MessageBox API in your Windows Service? (Or do you display any type of User Interface?) [msdn.com]

    and it says:

    Starting with Windows Vista and above, user interfaces generated by Windows services can’t be seen. And even worst, your service could be stuck waiting for some user input that the user cannot give as she does not see anything!

    It goes on to give a generic solution (plus a simple solution for just a messagebox), but it's anything but trivial.

    But I was right to be wary.

    And I'm not sure that this solution will work on a Windows earlier than Vista. At worst, you might have to hack in 2 interfaces, for multiple versions of Windows.

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