Windows Shutdown Notification of Console Application

[yeye_olive]

@qtYoda

There is a way to be notified when the user closes the console or hits Ctrl+C. I have tried it and it works; you might want to try it to see if it also works when the user shuts down Windows without closing the console first (it should according to MSDN). I did the following:
1. upon initializing the application, call SetConsoleCtrlHandler() to register a handler that will get called when the console is closed or Ctrl+C is hit;
2. in the handler, forward the notification to Qt's event loop by using e.g. QCoreApplication::postEvent() with a dedicated custom event, then return TRUE;
3. do the heavy work upon receiving the custom event, then exit using e.g. QCoreApplication::quit().
Note that it is simpler than the equivalent in Unix, where you cannot do much in a signal handler. There are a number of solutions to that issue, notably using a pipe, or running sigwait() in a dedicated thread, or using the Linux-specific signalfd() system call.

[qtYoda]

Thanks everyone. Here is what I've tried.

When I posted I had already tried 1) connecting via "aboutToQuit" signal, and 2) the signalhandler method to get the users Ctrl-C method. Neither seemed to be getting informed when the user just shutdown or restarted via the standard "Start/Turn Off Computer" method.

So I started thinking that, since the program has no window (and no console), Windows would not inform anything. I found some online documentation that Microsoft provides a method to create a hidden "window" that is there just for the purpose of getting windows messages. So I used RegisterClassEx() and CreateWindowEx() to create the non-window "window" and hooked into the message loop with that "window". Inside the message loop I write a simple message to to file so I can see when the function is called. I know it's being called in normal situations when Windows is telling the window to shutdown via WM_QUIT/VM_CLOSE/VM_DESTROY. But its NOT calling the message hook when the user chooses to shutdown/restart. Argghhhh!

I'm begining to think that, since what I'm really doing is what is normally thought of as a "Windows Service", that I need to just implement this as a Windows Service and hook into the management paradigm for services. Any other thoughts before I start down that road would be appreciated if they might shed light on getting Windows to simply let me know when it intends to kill my program.