Focus issue

[Tom]

Another question relating to focus: Is it possible to set the focus to
another program's window and send it keystrokes, YET still keep my VB
program in the foreground (i.e. showing on the screen)? For instance, I want
to monitor another program's window and send keytstrokes to it, yet I want
my VB.NET program to remain in the foreground, where I will show progress
indicators.

Is this even possible in .NET? I believe it was in VB6 (cause I have a
program that did that) yet I can't get it to work in .NET

Tom

 

[Guest]

Yes, it it possible.

Is the window you want to set focus to part of your application or external?

Does the window title change?

Obviously, to keep your window on top you can use:

Me.TopMost = True

However, there are a few ways to set the focus to the other application:

FindWindow API (Window text or class name)
GetProcessByName & Activate it are just a few ways

 

[Tom]

Crouchie: Yes, this is an external application that I am calling. I want to
set focus to it (the external application) and send it keystrokes; however,
I would like to keep this external application in the background - i.e. keep
my application in the front.

So exactly which APIs must I call to do this? Thanks.

Tom

 

[Guest]

Set your application to topmost:

Me.TopMost = True ' You application is now the TopMost windows.

Is the 'window caption' a constant value in your external application? If
so, you can use FindWindow to get its Handle etc.

Awaiting your reply to the Window Caption question

 

[Tom]

Crouchie: OK, I've set my TopMost to True (and set it to False when the form
is closing).

And yes, I believe that my window caption is a constant value. Actually, I
am using FindWindow, and FindWindowLike to get the handle of the
application; that I am not having a problem with. I just need to set the
focus to that external application (so I can send it keystrokes) yet keep
the other window in the front to display statistics (via a timer).

I've played around with SetFocusAPI, BringProcessToFront, SetToForeground,
etc; however, I am unsure as to exactly which one (if only one) I need to
use to accomplish this task.

One more thing: I find that if I have used one of these APIs to set focus to
the external application, it seems to have a hard time setting focus BACK to
my main VB.NET application once it gets done. I tried a simple Me.Focus but
the external application still stays up. Any ideas on that?

Tom

 

[Tom]

Crouchie: Yep, TopMost worked great... now I can use the API calls to set
focus but the main VB.NET window stays in the forefront.

Now if I can just figure out why I can't reset focus back to the .NET form
when my sendkeys are done....