[wpkg-users] Vista and WPKG

[Dr. Frank Lee]

Hi All,

I've got a few Vista machines to support now, alas, so I've been giving 
some thought to how to get some information about what WPKG is doing to 
the users. This mail is me "thinking aloud" so that people get a chance to 
direct my efforts - or maybe offer assistance!

The current WPKG client uses winlogon hooks to display its user message. 
These hooks have been removed from Vista so we need to use a different 
method. So far I've coded up a proof-of-concept executable which uses the 
WTSSendMessage API to put a message on the session attached to the 
physical console of the system (works under Vista Enterprise and XP Pro).

I'm using named pipes to communicate - the intention is that wpkg.js will 
be able to send information down the named pipe to communicate to the 
user. WTSSendMessage just displays a message box to the user with at least 
an "OK" button, so what I think I need to do is have a thread monitoring 
whether the user has dismissed the message box or whether the message 
box has timed-out, and immediately produce another one with the latest 
message. Another thread will monitor the named pipe and put the latest 
message into a buffer for display. (That's today's job!)

I think this means that there's no guarantee that the message from WPKG 
will actually get seen by the user (message A might get displayed, message 
B might be over-written by message C while message A is displayed, then 
message C is displayed) but perhaps offers some information about what is 
going on.

Any comments?

Yours,

Frank