get descriptor of window

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Create an On-screen Keyboard

I'm trying to write a virtual keyboard. Can you tell me how I can get the descriptor hWnd of the focused window? (It can be for Word, Excel, Skype, etc.)

I'm using findWindow(), but for that I must know the name of the window.

IntPtr hWnd = FindWindow("Notepad", null);

        if (!hWnd.Equals(IntPtr.Zero))
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Tagil");
            IntPtr edithWnd = FindWindowEx(hWnd, IntPtr.Zero, "Edit", null);
            if (!edithWnd.Equals(IntPtr.Zero))
                SendMessage(hWnd, WM_SETTEXT, IntPtr.Zero, new StringBuilder("Hello World"));
        }

are you wanting to get the name / handle of the Foreground Window..? — MethodMan, Feb 14 '12 at 19:00
yes but i think not Foreground because foreground is my Apllictation. I want to get name or handing other window — Abbath, Feb 15 '12 at 08:35
Would't it be best to work with the Windows [Accessability API](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/gg712214.aspx) to provide the extra keyboard? — Deanna, Aug 09 '12 at 08:32

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 14 '12 at 22:53

For what it's worth, this is very likely the wrong approach to writing a virtual keyboard; you'd be better off to use SendInput to inject the keystrokes, and let Windows/USER32 handle routing the input to the current focused window itself - this way you don't even need to know the current focused window in the first place.

One issue is that while Edit/Richedit control will use WM_SETTEXT, many other real-world editable controls - like Word, Excel and so on - don't. Also, you can't use WM_SETTEXT to send arrow keys or other non-textual content.

If you still really need to find the current focused HWND, you can use GetGUIThreadInfo, passing 0 for the idThread, and then use the hwndFocus member of the GUITHREADINFO struct that is returned.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 14 '12 at 18:59

0

HWND WINAPI GetForegroundWindow(void);

Retrieves a handle to the foreground window (the window with which the user is currently working). The system assigns a slightly higher priority to the thread that creates the foreground window than it does to other threads.

HWND WINAPI GetActiveWindow(void);

Retrieves the window handle to the active window attached to the calling thread's message queue.

One of those will probably do it.

answered Feb 14 '12 at 18:59

vmpstr

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`GetActiveWindow` is no use here since the window will reside in a different process. – David Heffernan Feb 14 '12 at 21:37
GetForegroundWindow and GetActiveWindow they return Form1 – Abbath Feb 15 '12 at 06:56

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Aug 08 '12 at 16:07

if you want a more complex example here you can look at this as well

See example on how you can do this with full source code here:

http://www.csharphelp.com/2006/08/get-current-window-handle-and-caption-with-windows-api-in-c/

[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern IntPtr GetForegroundWindow();

[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern int GetWindowText(IntPtr hWnd, StringBuilder text, int count);

private string GetActiveWindowTitle()
{
    const int nChars = 256;
    IntPtr handle = IntPtr.Zero;
    StringBuilder Buff = new StringBuilder(nChars);
    handle = GetForegroundWindow();

    if (GetWindowText(handle, Buff, nChars) > 0)
    {
        return Buff.ToString();
    }
    return null;
}

http://www.csharphelp.com/archives2/archive301.html in this link empty page — Abbath, Feb 15 '12 at 06:57

get descriptor of window

3 Answers3