Is there a way to detect when your program is being terminated using Task
Manager.

I have an application that uses CreateProcess to start a third party
application with  wShowWindow = WS_HIDE
I would like to show the main window of the spawned application when my
application is closed for whatever reason.

Daniel

Yes.  A message is sent to its window.  I don't happen
to know what message, but if I wanted to find out, I
would use the spy utility that has come with the last
6 or 7 versions of Visual C++.  With spy, you can see
what messages are being sent to any particular window
of your choosing.

--
-Larry Brasfield
(address munged, s/sn/h/ to reply)

I had another look at the message with spy++ v5.00.7022 and with all mesages
logged I can't see any message sent to the application window when after the
task manager is activated. (The main window is hidden at the time with a
systray icon for user interaction)

Perhaps the message is sent to WinMain but not dispatched to the main
window.
What do you think?

Daniel

The most reliable way to detect process termination is to open a handle to
it and wait for it to become signalled. To OpenProcess() requires a handle
which you can get, subject to privilege checks, if you have an ID. You can
get a scan the process list for a process id with Process32First() &
Process32Next() - except on NT before Windows 2000. On NT 4 use
EnumProcesses() (assuming you have PSAPI installed), on NT versions prior to
4 I think you need to scour the performance data in the registry.

Regards,
Will

Thankyou for the tip, it will certainly help me with another aspect of my
current project but doesn't quite get me past my current problem.

As I mentioned before my application spawns a 3rd party application who's
main window is hidden.
I hope to detect when my application is being terminated by Task Manager so
that the spawned application can either be shown or terminated before my
application is terminated.

I fou have any further suggestions that help achieve this goal let me know.
Daniel

know.

:-)

In an interactive environment like Windows the user is king. If he wants to
terminate a process he ought to be able to. The best you can do is catch the
event and deal with it. As a previous poster mentioned you ought to look at
the message flow first to see if a simple WM_CLOSE or
WM_SYSCOMMAND/SC_CLOSE is what causes the exit.

Failing that, when a user chooses 'End Now'  button the Task Manager will
call TerminateProcess() to blow away your application. This is a summary and
brutal execution without chance of pardon or appeal. There is almost nothing
you can do about it. It would be better to eliminate whatever cause the user
has to take such a drastic measure.

Regards,
Will

Well I guess that answers my question then.

After I was unable to find a message that caused the program termination
when the process was killed with task manager I suspected that it must use
TerminateProcess or some equally drastic method.
I remember being able to postpone process termination in Visual Basic
through the QueryUnload event but back then I was using Windows 95 so there
is a good chance that the process termination is handled in a different way.
That is something that I can look into when I get a moment.

I like my applications to clean up after themselves even in the most extreme
of circumstances and the task manager was the only one that I wasn't able to
adequately handle as unlikely as it is to occur.

Thank you for your valuable advice,
Daniel

After some more experimenting I have found that when an aplication is
terminated using the 'End Task' button in the Task Manager a WM_CLOSE
message is sent to the application window.

When the 'End Process' button is used to kill the process no messages are
sent.

As far as I can tell 'End Task' is only available for windows that have the
WS_VISIBLE style set.

Thankyou to everyone who has helped with this topic,
Daniel

Good old WM_CLOSE. But it is only posted when you kill from Applications
tab. Processes tab just calls TerminateProcess.
--
With best wishes,
    Igor Tandetnik

"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat,
and wrong." H.L. Mencken