Visual Studio will give you the following error: You won’t be able to start your binary under the debugger even if it’s properly located in the C:Program Files and you’ve started the environment with elevated rights.Of course, if you are going to distribute your application, you’ll need to have your installation put it in the C:Program Files directory and not allow the user to change it. By copying the binary, you can run the application and get your hook set. That’s the only acceptable place for accessibility applications to run. You must copy the binary that sets the recording hook into a directory under the C:Program Files directory. This was the hardest item for me to figure out and it wasn’t until I ran across a random forum entry that provided the missing clue. You won’t be able to run your application where you built it.Read about how and where you can get reasonably priced certificates here. The output binary must be digitally signed with a valid certificate.Here’s how you’ll set those up in the Linker, Manifest File section of the property page: Because a journal recording hook falls into the accessibility portion of windows, the uiAccess must be set to true. Your program’s manifest has to be set to requireAdministrator for the execution level.As I never found this information in one spot, I thought I’d put it here in case someone else wants to use a journal recording hook. I dug in for battle and fired up the search engines hard. Anyway, turning off UAC just for journal recording was the easy way out and made me feel dirty. That was totally unacceptable to me as I have written before I like UAC. While I was all in favor of closing the hole, how in the heck was I going to get my simple recorder application to work?Īccording to some of the forum reading it looked like people got journal recording working by turning off UAC. After several hours of searching I’d run across several articles where there were discussion about how the journal recording hook was used by key loggers and other nefarious programs so Microsoft was making changes in Vista to close that hole. It turns out lots of people were reporting the same issue, but all the reports were from way back in the Vista beta days. If only it were that easy, because I still got the access denied when running with high integrity as well. The last error value was access denied so I simply thought that I needed to run the recorder process with elevated rights. My debug builds were always asserting because SetWindowsHookEx was returning false when my recorder application tried to set the WH_JOURNALRECORD journal recorder to record all the mouse and keystrokes. After 20 minutes of some tweaks and adjustments to move the application to 64 bits, the real work started.
#Uopilot and you code#
Today, I had a need so grabbed the code with the thought of giving it a quick dusting off so I could use it on Vista 圆4. Since I rarely do any UI development, I don’t need Tester that much myself. At least it was very gratifying to know I’d produced something useful! In fact, there were so many, I probably should have made a business out of updating and supporting the tool. While Tester wasn’t perfect, the number of companies using it as their automation tool of choice was very gratifying. With it you could record and playback UI automation scripts. Eons ago in Internet years, I wrote what proved to be a very popular tool, Tester, the latest edition appeared in my second book.