Let me give you the background:
I am a computer systems engineer by day and audio engineer by night. I am responsible for the sound, lighting and projection systems at our Church. I have recently designed and installed a system for the sound based on a new Yamaha Digital mixing console. The idea is that the console connects via MIDI to a Windows XP Pro PC running 3 main apps:
1) Steinberg Cubase VST (to allow MIDI control of the mixer)
2) PAS Spectrum Analyzer Professional (to provide spectrum analysis on the input of one of two installed soundcards
3) Steinberg Wavelab (to record the input of the second sound card)
All 3 programs are configured to automatically load at startup for the minimum possible user interaction with the PC.
The PC is connected to two LCD screens. The primary screen is intended to display the Cubase software and the secondary screen will be split horizontally to display spectrum analysis on the top half and the recording on the lower half.
The PC is also fitted with a PCI WLAN card and we have an ASUS MyPAL A620BT Pocket PC with a WLAN Compact Flash adaptor to communicate with the PC. I have a program called PTvncGPRS installed on the PPC which acts as a VNC client providing a full screen display of the host PC.
You can probably see by now that the intention is to be able to wirelessly remote control the audio mixer from a PPC anywhere in (or even out) of the Church auditorium.
My problem is this:
The VNC client on the PPC only displays the host PC's primary display. Since Cubase will run fine on the primary display, this does not present a problem EXCEPT that the PAS Spectrum Analysis software will NOT remember it's screen location. Every time it loads, it starts maximized on the primary display regardless of where I moved it to during the previous session.
I seem to recall that in Win9x there were lines in the WIN.INI or the SYSTEM.INI file that specified the location and size of various programs' windows. I can find no such references in these files on the Windows XP system. Even if I load the program with the "start minimized" switch in the shortcut it starts maximized so I don't think it's programmed to be too "Windows-friendly". There is nothing in the program documentation about this and PAS technical support have been far less than helpful.
Having had some very limited experience with Visual Basic environments, what I would like to do is write a VB script that will take the PAS Spectrum Analyzer app window AFTER it has loaded into it's default position maximized on the primary display, and MOVE it to the secondary display. I don't mind if it is still maximized on the secondary display as Wavelab will happily load over the top of the lower half of Spectrum Analyzer's window.
Can anyone shed some light??
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Thanks dbrckovi!! I was working on some code which was getting me there but with a very round-about method. This is perfect!! 8-)
I am thinking that the SW_SHOWMINIMIZED = 2 and SW_SHOWMAXIMIZED = 3 constant declarations (the maximized one particularly) will also work to maximize the window when it has been moved to the second display area - do you know if that's right?
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by: dbrckoviPosted on 2005-02-16 at 01:50:17ID: 13322158
Hi!
You say you have some experience with Visual Basic. If you have it installed, then you can create small program which will find application's window,
normalize it (if it's maximized), and move it to fixed location.
Here's how you can do the same thing with Notepad window:
- start Visual Basic 6 -> Standard EXE project
- double click on the form and paste this code:
'-------------------------
'first, declare API functions and constants which plan to use...
Private Declare Function FindWindow Lib "user32" Alias "FindWindowA" (ByVal lpClassName As String, ByVal lpWindowName As String) As Long
Private Declare Function ShowWindow Lib "user32" (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal nCmdShow As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function MoveWindow Lib "user32" (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal x As Long, ByVal y As Long, ByVal nWidth As Long, ByVal nHeight As Long, ByVal bRepaint As Long) As Long
Private Const SW_NORMAL = 1
Private Sub Form_Load() 'when the form loads...
Dim Handle As Long 'a variable which stores handle to window
Handle = FindWindow(vbNullString, "Untitled - Notepad") 'find a window with this title: "Untitled - Notepad"
ShowWindow Handle, SW_NORMAL 'normalize the window
MoveWindow Handle, 10, 10, 1000, 1000, 1 'move it to coordinates (10,10)-(1000,1000) and repaint it
End 'quit
End Sub
'-------------------------
Now you can click File -> Make Project1.exe to create an exe out of it, or you can press F5 to run it from within Visual Basic.
To change it so it will resize Analyzer app. instead of Notepad, you have to change "Untitled - Notepad" to the text which you see in Analyzer app's title bar.