calling an external program from within a windows GUI

[korbitz]

okay heres the scenario, i have a mdi GUI and a GLUT visualisation image

heres my problem, GLUT dont work with winMain so i have 3 solutions to my problem

1. Rewrite GLUT into openGL or somehow get GLUT to work with winMain : Time scale may not permit this.
(have only 2 weeks)

2. Rewrite GUI into something GLUT understands : Forget that, definately dont have time for that

3. Call GLUT visualisation as an external program : This i think is my best choice and I am wondering how i would accomplish this, if at all it is possible

if anyone can offer help on these it would be much appreciated

thanx in advance

korbitz

[jverkoey]

well, i haven't worked much with GLUT, but I think that there is a way to integrate it with winmain, someone else here who has a bit more experience with that might be able to help. Otherwise, I've got some sample code that I've used before to start a separate process and it works pretty nicely:

(taken directly from some of my OpenScript2.0 code, with some modifications so it's a bit more readable)

STARTUPINFO startInfo;
PROCESS_INFORMATION procInfo;

ZeroMemory(&procInfo,sizeof(PROCESS_INFORMATION));
ZeroMemory(&startInfo,sizeof(STARTUPINFO));

char Buff[2048]="C:\somePath\myprocess.exe";
CreateProcess(NULL, Buff, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &startInfo, &procInfo);

-edit-
note: the two structures that i used there have to be used, i tried using it with just the buffer, but it crashed when i didn't have those pointers in there

This will create and run the process, and then immediately return from the function (so you can have it run independantly of your program, kind of like a thread, but actually a separate process)

also, there's some msdn info on this function if you want to know what goes in for all of those NULLs if you want to actually use 'em

*quick msdn search....*

*found*

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...ateprocess.asp

that's got all the info, the code I gave you is just the bare minimum to get a process running and seems to work pretty nicely.

I'm not sure exactly what your program works like, so I don't know if you'll be able to use this code or not, but it's here for your reference and hopefully someone'll get something out of it