Monogame Launches Two Windows On Windows OS

David_Lent · July 13, 2022, 5:02am

I’ve come across a rather strange problem that only seems to occur when Monogame .exe’s are run on Windows. It doesn’t happen with executables on MacOS. When you click on the .exe it creates a black window that has the path to the exe written on it and it also opens the game’s window. I’ve verified this with multiple games. If you close the black window it will also close the game’s window. Does anyone know how to prevent this from happening? I’d like to just have the game window open when the .exe is clicked on.

David_Lent · July 14, 2022, 4:59am

I figured out the solution to this bizarre problem. If you are in Visual Studio for Mac and do a “dotnet publish -r win-x64” to publish a Windows version, the published .exe will run perfectly on a Windows box EXCEPT it launches an extra black window for unknown reasons. I decided to download my solution to my Windows box and ran “dotnet publish -r win-x64” in Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and the .exe it creates does not create the extra black window. Now I know that I better publish the Windows version of my games on Visual Studio for Windows to avoid this problem.

Clonkex · July 19, 2022, 2:16am

I don’t know what I’m talking about, but it sounds to me like VS for Mac is building it as a console application (the black window is a Command Prompt window, the equivalent of a Terminal window on Mac or Linux).

David_Lent · July 19, 2022, 2:19am

That’s probably what it’s doing. However, when dotnet publish -r win-x64 is run on a Mac, Visual Studio for Mac should build the exact same executable as it would when running dotnet publish -r win-x64 on a Windows version of Visual Studio. I’m racking this one up as a Visual Studio for Mac bug.

Fire_crow · March 30, 2023, 5:57pm

i have the same problem in vs 2022 for mac in windows and mac

Apostolique · April 1, 2023, 2:19am

It’s an issue with dotnet publish on non Windows platforms. You can read more about it here:

github.com/dotnet/runtime

Use cross-platform code to update apphost win32 resources, open apphost only once for writing

opened 08:55PM - 04 Nov 19 UTC

nguerrera

area-HostModel

On https://github.com/dotnet/core-setup/pull/6831, it was noted that there now e…xists some portable code somewhere to update win32 resources, but we are still updating using Win32 API. The downsides of using the win32 API are: 1. Prevents cross-compilation of apphost. You have to be on a windows build machine to build a windows apphost executable. Even a Windows Nano server is not up to the task. 2. Prevents something like Anti-Virus, sneaking in between different opens of the apphost. We currently open it once to patch in the app name over the placeholder, and again to patch the win32 resources. This should be done with a single open. Various attempts have been made to get around the anti-virus (or anti-virus-like) issues with retries, but we are seeing that is insufficient with multiple users still running into issues regularly. See https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/11650#issuecomment-549478350 cc @swaroop-sridhar @jeffschwMSFT @peterhuene @davidwrighton

reiti.net · April 1, 2023, 2:29am

Not sure if this is related (and I am on an older version of MG) but when I run the game in fullscreen and alt-tab to see the open windows, there is a black window displayed next to the actual game window in the open tasks … but yea, older version, so maybe this exact issue for me is already solved - just in case it’s related somehow and helpful for finding out.