Prevent dialogs appearing in unattended builds

Question

I was wondering is there is a fool-proof way to run a program on windows such that I'm guaranteed that no interactive dialogs of any kind are displayed.

I've tried the registry ErrorMode hack, calling _CrtSetReportMode(), etc., but they all have holes in them or require you to modify the program.

I need a way to run an arbitrary program and practically force Windows to execute them such that there is no possibility for them to open a window. It is perfectly ok for the program to crash if it attempts to open a window.

Would running the program as a service solve the problem?

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any other ways that might possibly work. Running as a service won't solve the problem either as the dialog will be displayed on the service's desktop, which you generally don't have access to.

Answer 2

You could use a library such as Detours to intercept all calls to functions that might display a dialog box (this might in fact be nearly everything in user32.dll).