Broadcast Mouse movements

[Frag_68]

As an IT person in a school, we're often running around and completing the same task on many machines. For instance, we want to adjust one little setting on all the computers. I've researched this a bit in the multiboxing communities, but there doesn't seem to be a free, simple executable that I could drop on my clients and control them all simultaneously. So... I want to write my own.

The question is... where do I start? I've done a lot of Delphi programming, but I've never tried to write one that communicates across a network. Let alone to 30 machines at once. My goal would be to have a "server" app and then a "client" app. If I could broadcast mouse movements and clicks, that'd be great. If I could also broadcast keystrokes... that'd be awesome.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

[Norrit]

I doubt this is possible to send messages over a network...

What you could do is write a message recorder/player app... Just record on 1 pc, copy the app including the recording to the other pc's and execute...

[Frag_68]

Actually, I got it working for mouse clicks. I use TIDudpserver and client and simply set the host to the broadcast IP (ex. 192.168.1.255 for a Class C subnet) then send out the message. It worked perfectly. Now to figure out how to add keystrokes. I'll post more complete code when finished.

[Frag_68]

So here's the basic of what I did to facilitate sending the mouse over the network. To conserve bandwidth, I only sent clicks, but I had easily replicated mouse movements as well.


MASTER:

procedure TForm1.Timer1Timer(Sender: TObject);
var
  pt : TPoint;
  x,y : string;
begin
  if GetAsyncKeyState(VK_LBUTTON) >= 0 then
    wassent := false;
  if (wassent = false) and (GetAsyncKeyState(VK_LBUTTON) < 0) then
  begin
    wassent := true;
    getcursorpos(pt);
    x := inttostr(pt.X);
    y := inttostr(pt.y);
    idudpclient1.Send(x+','+y);
  end;
end;

MINION:

procedure TForm1.IdUDPServer1UDPRead(AThread: TIdUDPListenerThread;
  AData: TBytes; ABinding: TIdSocketHandle);
var
  LMsg: string;
  cpos, x,y : integer;
begin
  if Length(AData) <> 0 then
  begin
    LMsg := BytesToString(AData);
    cpos := pos(',',lmsg);
    x := strtoint(copy(lMsg, 1, cpos-1));
    y := strtoint(copy(lmsg,cpos+1,maxint));
    setcursorpos(x,y);
    Mouse_Event(MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTDOWN, 0, 0, 0, 0);
    Mouse_Event(MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTUP, 0, 0, 0, 0);
  end;
end;

The completed project, which also facilitates keyboard transmission as well can be found here:
http://sites.google.com/site/fragsixtyeight/home/mb