How to minimize IE Browser using C# ?

Question

How can I minimize the IE Browser using C#? I tried the code mentioned below which didn't work:

var processes = Process.GetProcessesByName("*iexplorer.*");

if (processes.Any()) 
{

    var handle = processes.First().MainWindowHandle;
    ShowWindow(handle, SW_SHOWMINIMIZED); 

}

Are there any other methods to achieve minimizing of the IE Browser?

for a more general solution, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9254037/how-to-programmatically-minimize-opened-window-folders — nawfal, Sep 19 '12 at 09:48

JMK · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-18T12:14:25.170

As Damien says, there is no fullproof way to do this as the user owns the browser, not your app. Your code isn't working because you are trying to use a wildcard symbol (*) like you would do on Google, but this doesn't work here. GetProcessesByName is literally looking for a process named *iexplorer.*. You can confirm this by placing a breakpoint underneath this line, and hovering over processList, it is an empty array. Changing this to iexplore fixes this problem.

Some tested and working code is below:

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        [DllImport("user32.dll")]
        static extern bool ShowWindow(IntPtr hWnd, int nCmdShow);

        static void Main()
        {
            var processes = Process.GetProcessesByName("iexplore");

            foreach (var process in processes)
            {
                ShowWindow(process.MainWindowHandle, 2);
            }
        }
    }
}

How to minimize IE Browser using C# ?

1 Answers1

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