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DigiView Plug-in Guide

Navigation: Debugging > Debugging Tips

Hidden Dialogs

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DigiView presents modal dialogs to allow you to attach a debugger to a plug-in and to report timeouts.  These are configured to always be on top of the DigiView application.  However, in some circumstances, Windows will ignore the setting and paint the application itself on top of the dialogs.  Since the dialogs are modal, Windows will freeze the main application itself (DigiView) until the dialog is dismissed.  Since the dialog is hidden behind the application, you can not dismiss it.

Note that this is not a DigiView specific problem.  It just seems more confusing when you have 2 interactive programs (DigiView and the Debugger) running at the same time.  This seems to happen in Windows if you have a modal dialog open in one application, then switch to another application.  When you return to the first application, Windows sometimes paints it on top of its modal dialog, creating this problem.

We have seen this behavior if the timeout dialog is present and you click RUN in the Visual Studio Express debugger to allow the plug-in to complete. When the plug-in finishes, focus is returned to DigiView but it paints in the wrong order.

There are 3 wwork-arounds to this problem:

Click on DigiView's icon in the task bar TWICE. The first click will sometimes minimize the application or other times appear to do nothing.  The second click will usually paint the application and dialog in the correct order so the dialog is on top where you can dismiss it.

Or dismiss the dialog BEFORE pressing RUN in Visual Studio (assuming you can do so in 2 seconds).

Or move the dialog to a blank spot on the desktop when it pops up so that you will always have access to it, no matter what order Windows paints items..