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Is there a way to bring in another, running application into Focus entirely in .Net (so I can avoid API calls)?
I'm basically trying to make it so only 1 instance of my app is shown and if a user tries to run another instance, it brings the already running versions to the front.
The only way that I'm aware of that doesn't use APIs is the VB.NET AppActivate function, but it won't restore a minimised window. VB 2005 has single-instance functionality built in. I don't know of one but there may be a way to leverage that functionality from a C# app. I've seen articles about using the VB My namespace in C# so it might be an extension of that.
I submitted an article in the codebank about using a Mutex class to create a single-instance and that works great but I don't see anyway of leveraging that to bring the first instance into focus.
Not sure how to use any of the VB specific methods to help in this situation.
I would use an API to do this but I'd like to stay away from it so my app will continue to run under the Mono framework (so I can run it on linux).
I'd guess that VB-specific features like Runtime functions and My would be low on the list of priorities for Mono as most people developing for Mono would be using C#. I'm not aware of any "pure .NET" method of doing what you want, outside of the in-built VB 2005 support that may never see the light of day in Mono. I suppose that you could set up some form of IPC between instances of your app, so the new instance can speak directly to the existing instance.
You can use the System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcessesByName() to get a Process object that represents your other process, and then perhaps write a message to it on it's StandardInput. In your code, you could have a thread polling on the standard input, and if you receive a message, bring the application to the front.
Probably not the best way to do it, but probably pretty portable.
Edit:
If you add a reference to Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll, you can do the following:
I couldn't test this under mono since apparently my mono install seems to have been borked and can't load libgdiplus, even though it's specified in LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
Code:Process pThis = Process.GetCurrentProcess();
Process[] pMatches = Process.GetProcessesByName(pThis.ProcessName);
if (pMatches.Length == 2)
{
Process pOther = pMatches[0];
if (pOther.Id == pThis.Id)
pOther = pMatches[1];
Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction.AppActivate(pOther.Id);
return;
}
I can't use GetProcessesByName() as it is not reliable. If my app's executable is "MyApp.exe" and company Y already makes a product with its executable name as "MyApp.exe", then I may get their process and not mine.
This was one of the reasons I'm using a Mutex to ensure only 1 instance of my app is active at any given time.
I'm going to look into using IPC for this.
How about this?
I already said I'm trying to stay away from using the Win32 API.Quote:
Originally Posted by dee-u