Silviu-Marius Ardelean's blog

I am pleased to announce my first cross-platform and open source project, the Process Status Analysis tool, available on GitHub.

The Process Status Analysis (psa) version 0.2 is available for Windows and Linux (Debian derived / Ubuntu tested) Operating Systems.
Download: psa for Ubuntu Linux x64 (430 downloads)
Download: psa for Ubuntu Linux x86 (277 downloads)
Download: psa.exe for Windows x64 (265 downloads)
Download: psa.exe for Win32 (274 downloads)

You may wonder why I did it or what it brings new. Well, I did it for fun, in my spare time and I will continue improving it when I’ll find a time to do it.

The project is written in modern C++ using idioms from the C++ 1x standards. Even if initially was done as a C++ for Windows only, during the past days I managed the port of it for Linux using Visual Studio 2017’s project templates and a connection via SSH.
In general, the source code base is similar, differing just by OS specific stuff.

In case you want to find out more about how to develop C++ Linux projects from the best development tool (imho), Visual Studio, you can find more information on Visual Studio development team blog.

Related to this psa project, the Linux version requires libprocps4-dev library in order to build.

The main reason for starting this project was that I wanted to know what’s the total memory amount used by my Chrome browser. I know it uses a lot of resources but not that much… 🙂

Even if my preferred processes analysis tool, the Process Hacker offers a lot of processes administration possibilities but it didn’t provide what I want, so I decided to enjoy a bit.

Sample – Google Chrome processes in Process Hacker tool

So, what I achieved by psa.exe was something like:

A bit too much in my humble opinion…
The features this tool offers includes:

Get all processes loaded in memory information

I case you want to have a snapshot of all the processes loaded in the OS’s memory you can have it with.

Get process only used memory

With psa.exe you can reach the used memory by a specific parameter -o after the process name or at least a part of it’s name.

Currently, there is no string replace ‘*’ but it’s ongoing.

Print processes tree

Storing the processes’ data within a generic tree done by me I took the decision to print the processes tree output, in a similar way there is in Windows with tree.exe tool or on Linux in pstree or even htop.

Process Status Analysis partial tree of Windows process

Top most “expensive” processes

In case you want to see what are the most expensive processes within your operating system you can achieve it with:

or simpler “psa -e” in case you’re sure you want top 10 expensive processes (the default value).

Redirect output to a file

From the standard output the information can be easely redirected to a file.

Kill process feature

This feature was not implemented yet but in case we need it we can be done it easily with the existing tools on the target OS (ex. Task Manager, Process Exporer/Hacker, pskill.exe for Windows or the combination ps + kill on LInux).

Feedbacks and improvements
Any constructive feedback, suggestions, contributions to improvements are appreciated.
Feel free to add any issue you find, wish or suggestion you have in the GitHub repository, the Issues section or here as a comment.

Manually editing of binary files version in the resource editor of Visual Studio IDE is not a viable solution. If we have dozens of projects in our solution, then for each kit building we should need manual resources file edit. Otherwise, we can use a special tool that does this thing for us.
Unfortunately this approach is not the most flexible and could fail.

For our flexible binaries properties changes and in order to avoid manual edit for each rebuild we can create and include a header file (version.h) that contains some constants of product version and file version of our project (.rc files).

We have to include only these constants into this file (version.h):

Then, for each .rc file wherever we have FileVersion and ProductVersion we have to use this constants.
When we will build a new kit, we have to change only these constants and then to start the kit building process. Everything is fine until we add new controls in our projects resource files. Then, because of Visual Studio IDE automation we can get an unlikely surprise: the FileVersion and the ProductVersion properties could be reset to 1.0.0.0.

In order to avoid this issue and edit the version only in a single place I propose the following workaround:

That code block looks like this:

Don’t forget to edit .rc2 file name with the right file name of your project.

The rest of the section’s lines have to be deleted.

Observations
Once you apply these steps, the product version properties will not possible from the Visual Studio IDE resource editor, anymore (only as edit text file or an external text editor). If we didn’t define something special in our project’s String Table we will see only IDS_ABOUTBOX.

Demo application - AutoProductVersion (1170 downloads)

Many times in our job, we need to work with files and need to know file properties.
One of the most important properties is file size. Of course, there are a lot of API that allows finding this property, but most of them needs additional file operations: open file, find file size and close file.

A direct and fast way in order to detect the file size without these operations means the CRT run-time library’s function _tstat64() and stuff.

In the header file or on .cpp file please add next macros definitions:

Then, write next function:

If you’re using WinAPI there is an even faster way in order to get file size.

Finally, call these functions wherever you need.

Many applications allow dynamic customization for visual objects or data views. For instance, well known Internet Explorer application provides toolbars customization using a popup menu that appears when the user execute right click mouse action in toolbar zone area.

Other sample where this kind of menu is very useful is when it’s used in order to customize database data representation in Windows controls like List control or grid control. These kind of applications allow data filtering and show/hide columns using this kind of menu. The user just right click on control header and gets what he need.

Starting from this idea, I implemented a class CDynamicPopupMenu. This class allows an easy building of this kind of menus. I used if in a demo dialog base application over a list control.

Internally, this class uses a STL container (std::map) with a data structure used in order to embed items menu properties. When the menu is built, menu’s behavior is implemented using these properties.

Add new menu item
The new item add menu method has next definition:

where:

Add separator item
Add separator item method definition looks like this:

where:

Menu add items sample
In my demo application, in CtestPopupMenuDlg::SetDefaultMapValues(void) method, among other things, you can find next calls:

Get menu internal data
In order to access the internal data container (std::map) that stores all dynamic menu items you just can use next method:

followed by:

Create and display menu
Menu creation must be done just after we add all menu items. The menu is displayed only after TrackPopupCustomMenu() call. The definition of this method looks like this:

where:

Function’s return value is the menu IDs that was selected. If no item was selected the function returns 0.
In my demo application, menus creation is called on list control right-click method (NM_RCLICK).

As you can see, I’m calling TrackPopupCostumMenu(), using mouse point property when the user right-click over list control.
I am saving list control handler, selected item ID and WM_NOTIFY value into a pointer to message notification structure NMHDR. Then I’m passing this pointer to OnNotify() method.
Using WM_NOTIFY message and OnNotify() method, I inform parent control window that a new event was generated.

I am calling GetItemCheckedFlag() if order to detect selected item check status (check / uncheck). Then, if item state means check I apply negation over this bool flag and I’m calling SetCheckedItemFlag() method. Finnaly this method produce changes in my control list, depending on my menu command (FillData() method).

Menu interaction with parent window (list control)
In my demo application, the interaction between dynamic menu and list control to be treated by FillData() method.
In order to use CDynamicPopupMenu’s internal container data is need to initialize a DynamicMenuData pointer with GetDynamicMenuData()’s returned value.

Using that pointer to internal menu data, I iterate over internal container, and for those items that are visible and selected set on true I insert columns in my list control.
Similarly, when using such menus, the application can apply filters on real data.
CDynamicPopupMenu class contains other useful methods. This kind of menu can be used in different situations in order to change application’s behavior.

Download demo application: testPopupMenu (Visual C++ 2005 project)