Question

Background

I’m using SendKeys() to send keyboard commands to the active window, but I’m not having any luck finding the child window when the application is running through RemoteApp. It all works as expected when I run the application locally.

Microsoft RemoteApp allows users to connect to applications through the RDP protocol, but instead of showing the entire remote Virtual machine, it just shows the application window. To the end user, there is no difference between an application running under RemoteApp and it running on their desktop.

I’ve been using ManagedSpy to determine the class name of the .NET application window so that I can use the Win32 API function FindWindowEx to make one of the child windows active, and it works well. However, I’m having a problem when the application is running over RemoteApp.

I can still use the .NET Process.GetProcessesByName() to find the application, I just have to have it invoke mstsc.exe:

IntPtr hwndChild = IntPtr.Zero;
Process[] processess = Process.GetProcessesByName("mstsc");
IntPtr appHandle = IntPtr.Zero;

foreach (Process p in processess)
{
    if ((p.MainWindowHandle != IntPtr.Zero))
    {
        appHandle = p.MainWindowHandle;
    }
}

if (appHandle == IntPtr.Zero)
{
    MessageBox.Show("Application is not Running.");
    return;
}

However, I can’t use FindWindowEx in the same way. This question revolves around that.

For the unmanaged code to tell me what windows mstsc.exe has active, I used Spy++, but for mstsc.exe it comes back with a different class name, called RAIL_WINDOW:

Here is the code I’m using to find the Child Window:

[DllImport("USER32.DLL")]
public static extern bool SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr hWnd);

[DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
private static extern IntPtr FindWindowEx(IntPtr parentHandle, IntPtr childAfter, string className, string windowTitle);
hwndChild = FindWindowEx(appHandle, IntPtr.Zero, "RAIL_WINDOW", "MyApplication (Remote)");
SetForegroundWindow(hwndChild);

Questions

1. I can use Spy++ to highlight the active child window in the RemoteApp version of the application, and I get RAIL_WINDOW, but I cannot seem to access this window programmatically. Given the code above, what am I missing to be able to do so?

2. Are there other ways of sending keyboard strokes to an application running over Remote App?

Answer 1

Knowing how Microsoft does things, I’ll bet the “rail window” is nothing more than a dumb, local proxy that doesn’t bother responding to what SendKeys is sending. I haven’t looked, but I’ll bet that ends up sending WM_CHAR messages, to which a dumb proxy probably wouldn’t bother responding. Instead, try sending it WM_KEYUP and WM_KEYDOWN messages manually and see if that works, given that I expect it would transmit those and mouse clicks (and what not) rather than the translated versions.