Sending keystrokes to a program

Question

In window form, I made a button and I'm trying to make it send F1 to a specific window (Such as FireFox, My Computer, etc...)

My questions are :

• How do I do it by the window's name? (such as "Mozilla Firefox")
• How do I do it by the process's name? (such as firefox.exe)

Solution 1

By Window name:

[DllImport("User32.dll")] 
static extern IntPtr FindWindow(string lpClassName, string lpWindowName);  
[DllImport("User32.dll")] 
static extern int SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr hWnd);

IntPtr ptrFF = FindWindow(null, "Mozilla Firefox");
SetForegroundWindow(ptrFF);
SendKeys.SendWait("{F1}");

By Process name:

Process proc = Process.GetProcessesByName("firefox")[0];
IntPtr ptrFF = proc.Handle;
SetForegroundWindow(ptrFF);
SendKeys.SendWait("{F1}");

Solution 2

Take a look into the SendKeys class.

Comments

[Kyle Rosendo]

@Or Betzalel - Updated with process name.

[astonish]

For community documentation purposes. From my experience "IntPtr ptrFF = proc.Handle;" will not grab the right handle. You should be using proc.MainWindowHandle instead. Ensure this is correct by using Spy++