Re: urgent: wi-fi popup blocker

Why is WZC largely undocumented?

Time and resources I guess? Platform Builder comes with the full source for
the NETUI control panel app, so there's a working sample in C that uses it -
there's just little documentation of what the APIs are or what the
parameters should be. It's a job of trial and error that is not terribly
fun to do.

For example, I needed to programmatically power on/off the wifi radio, and
there seems to be no standard way of doing that.. tools that exist operate
on the hardware directely (through drivers or something, or maybe ioctrl
?).

That's power management - not WZC. I don't think WZC even has an interface
for that. Powering it down is likely to be an OEM-dependent item. You
might be able to use the power management APIs to do it, but again, it will
vary from device to device.

It's very interesting/crucial what you mentioned about drivers storing
settings in flobal variables..
Is there really no way of accessing this info? I mean, obviously it would
have to be documented since each OEM might have their own drivers and ways
of storing things.. but would you have to operate on driver level?

"Driver level" on CE (pre 6.0) has no special meaning. An app can do
anything a driver can. That said, it's not easy to get at data in a driver
without either a documented API from the OEM or a serious amount of
investment in reverse engineering time and some specialty hardware.


The thing is, this WiFi popup thing is standard WM5 I think.. it's the
same kind of popup, looks are the same, so do most other configuration
screens in WM5.

Sure, the Platform forces the OEM to be somewhat standard. The popup
probably comes to the OEM for free. Handling what it does when you tap a
button doesn't. Keep in mind, Microsoft can't possibly know what an OEM may
use for hardware, and they can't possibly create drivers and software for
every possibility. They create the OS framework and require the OEM to
implement the hardware abstraction layer.


Is there some other way to block this popup you think? perhaps window
hook, that prevents the creation of that window?

No clue. A windows hook is unlikely. You already did what I'd consider a
first step in looking at the registry. Next is to use Spy++ and see if
there's any info to be gained there.

Based on experience, I'd say the liklihood of eliminating it is pretty slim
though. But hey, I've never tried so don't let my pessimism discourage you.
I could easily be wrong.


--
Chris Tacke
OpenNETCF Consulting
Managed Code in the Embedded World
www.opennetcf.com
--


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