Question

If I show a MessageBox as modal of a window on another process, it works just fine as long as my program remains responding. If it is closed or terminated while the MessageBox is showing the windows that received the MessageBox will be locked (but still responding) and it will have to be finalized via Task Manager.

Here is a sample code to demonstrate that:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Threading;

namespace TestMessageBox
{
    class Program
    {
        private WindowWrapper notepad;

        Program(IntPtr handle)
        { 
            notepad = new WindowWrapper(handle); 
        }

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Process[] procs = Process.GetProcessesByName("notepad");
            if (procs.Length > 0)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Notepad detected...");
                Program program = new Program(procs[0].MainWindowHandle);
                Thread thread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(program.ShowMessage));
                thread.IsBackground = true;
                thread.Start();
                Console.Write("Press any key to end the program and lock notepad...");
                Console.ReadKey();
            }
        }

        void ShowMessage()
        { 
            MessageBox.Show(notepad, "If this is open when the program ends\nit will lock up notepad..."); 
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Wrapper class so that we can return an IWin32Window given a hwnd
    /// </summary>
    public class WindowWrapper : System.Windows.Forms.IWin32Window
    {
        public WindowWrapper(IntPtr handle)
        { 
            _hwnd = handle; 
        }
        public IntPtr Handle
        { 
            get { return _hwnd; } 
        }
        private IntPtr _hwnd;
    }

}

How to avoid that?

Answer 1

The act of showing a modal dialog disables the parent window of the dialog (Notepad’s window in your example). When the modal dialog is closed, the parent window gets re-enabled.

If your program dies before it re-enables the window, that window will never get re-enabled – it’s up to the thread that’s showing the dialog to re-enable the parent. (In your example, it happens within MessageBox.Show(), after the user clicks OK or whatever.)

The only way to make this work would be to have a second process whose responsibility it was to put things back as they should be if the process creating the modal dialog dies prematurely, but that’s horrible. And it’s still not bulletproof – what if the watcher process dies too?