Program Watcher

**westweb** · 06-11-2007, 09:08 AM

HI guys,

A friend of mine works for a school and he has asked me if i could make a program for him, he wants it to look at what programs are running and if it is one that he has selected as not allowed he wants my program to give a message and shut it down.

I have managed to code that part that looks for the program in the process list and then shuts it down with a message, that part was easy. The problem i have is how do i make my program sit in the background and only complain when their is a program that a student tries to start up which is not allowed? My program is not in focus or talked to by the other applications so how do i make it actively look?

The language i use is VB6 on XP Pro

many thanks

**Hack** · 06-11-2007, 09:58 AM

Welcome to DevX.

A suggestion I have would be to have it sit in the system tray, and have your checker code get run from a timer that would fire at a preset interval.

**westweb** · 06-11-2007, 10:09 AM

oh ok i see.

Is it possible for VB to look at what programs are launching, i don;t know what a technical term for that would be, so it is actually checking each entry into the application running list as they are being entered?

thanks for the welcome, i am annoyed i have never found this site because it is really useful!

**Hack** · 06-11-2007, 10:12 AM

I have produced lists of running process before in my apps. I'm sure I did much the same thing you are doing now.

However, the only way I know of is to check what is currently running. I don't know of a way to check as soon as an application starts. I think it has to be in the task list before you know about it.

Hopefully, however, someone will come a along and prove me wrong.

**westweb** · 06-11-2007, 11:56 AM

If i did decide to use a timer, what would be a good interval?

**Hack** · 06-11-2007, 11:58 AM

There is no way of knowing the optimum time. It would take some trial and error.

I would suggest setting it high, running it, and just watching how it works.

**westweb** · 06-11-2007, 03:31 PM

if you set it quite fast to 100 then it stops the program from launching near enough, and running some CPU test it doesn't seem to have a big impact - but is that good programming?

**Hack** · 06-11-2007, 03:52 PM

Originally Posted by westweb

but is that good programming?

Does it work for you?

**westweb** · 06-11-2007, 04:17 PM

well it does.

sorry to keep posting, i feel like i am wearing the forums out lol

I have looked at most of the free code and there are still bits i can't understand. I would now like to extend the program so you can create a list of programs to be blocked on a server side version of the program (a database i imagine). Then all the client side programs can look at the database on the server and use the list of blocked programs, so there is no need to keep updating each client every time another piece of software needs to be blocked.

But i don't know where to start, any help would be much appreciated as i am new to networking in VB.

many thanks