Question

Issues of robustness, stability and you shouldn’t do this aside, has anyone ever filled in a windows credential prompt via code (so that’s one that looks like this:)

Is it possible to interact with these dialog boxes through Win32 APIs, or using SendKeys/send mouse / UI Automation? Any ideas / tips anyone has would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I ended up using the UI Automation framework, which allowed me to grab a reference to the credential prompt and then fill it out and complete it that way.

Code snippet:

AutomationElement desktop = AutomationElement.RootElement;
//get all windows on the desktop
AutomationElementCollection windows = desktop.FindAll(TreeScope.Descendants, new PropertyCondition(AutomationElement.ControlTypeProperty, ControlType.Window));
         foreach (AutomationElement window in windows)
        {
            if (window.Current.ClassName.Equals("#32770"))   //security dialog
            {

                // access the appropriate AutomationElements to enter credentials here

            }
        }

To interact with an element, you grab the appropriate Pattern object and call its methods (eg Textboxes have a ValuePattern which has a .SetValue() method.

I also used UISpy to find all the values for things like ClassNames, AutomationIds, etc to help find the correct item through .FindAll() and PropertyConditions objects.