hacking lync to start recording

Question

I have referred several sources and found that there is no way to programmatically control screen recording using lync sdk.

So I've taken a spyxx.exe approach in order to be able to figure out the messages the conversation window gets in order to start recording (in lync 2013)

How to start lync recording?

Prequisite: you should have recording enabled for your profile

Meet Now > Call > Share Desktop > Options > Start recording

So I've started my spyxx program; started a meet now conversation; located that window within spyxx, and listened to its messages. Then using the keyboard only I've tried to start recording and subsequently recorded the window messages that window receives.

Note: if you don't want spyxx.exe to get so many mouse move events, you can get rid of the desktop recording part altogether, and, simply start a call and directly start recording.

On studying the messages I think that these two messages should do the trick...

<000155> 002B030E P message:0x0504 [User-defined:WM_USER+260] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000000
<000156> 002B030E P message:0x0507 [User-defined:WM_USER+263] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000000

However, on trying to send these messages to the conversation window, it fails.

Here is the stub of code responsible for that specific task:

if(win != null)
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1})",win.title, win.handle);
    uint msg1 = 0x0504;
    uint msg2 = 0x0507;
    Console.WriteLine("Press for applying messages...");
    Console.ReadLine();
    Win32Native.PostMessage(win.handle, msg1);
    Win32Native.PostMessage(win.handle, msg2);
}

Entire code available here

Answer 1

I have used a combination of SendKeys.SendWait and SetForegroundWindow for this. Essentially this isn't sending messages to the Conversation window. Rather we are sending keystrokes. Not a good workaround. This is known to have problems. Relevant pieces of code goes something like:

Windowing.SetForegroundWindow(win.Handle);
SendKeys.SendWait("{TAB}");
SendKeys.SendWait("{TAB}");
SendKeys.SendWait("{TAB}");
SendKeys.SendWait("{TAB}");
SendKeys.SendWait("{TAB}");
SendKeys.SendWait("{TAB}");
SendKeys.SendWait("{TAB}");
SendKeys.SendWait("{TAB}");
SendKeys.SendWait("{TAB}");
SendKeys.SendWait(" ");
SendKeys.SendWait("r");

For the entire code you can check with my git project repo. The code there also shows how to stop a recording using the same approach.

For the winapi function calls I've used FmUtils.Winapi