Question

Not very sure how to explain it in a clear way. Basicaly, the thing is that I’m looking for a method to change a current active window ( Self-produced def., hope it’ll be understandable enough ) – window, where the text is directly typed right now. Whooh.

What have I allready discovered is msdn help and SetFocus() or SetActiveWindow(), but it doesn’t solve my problem ( or, what is also possible, I’m just using it in a wrong way ).

Simply:

HWND Dest = GetFocus();
... //Some moving around on the 'alt-tab level' :-|
SetFocus(Dest); 

Doesn’t set the Dest window active again.
Please, excuse for the newbie questions, hope it won’t take much time from you. Thanx!

Answer 1

SetFocus() does not bring a window to the top. It just sets the keyboard focus.

SetActiveWindow() on the other hand brings the specific window on top, but only if the application that calls it is also the application that owns it. ( according to the documentation).

When you say you did try SetActiveWindow() what do you mean? How did it fail? What results did it produce?

Another function you can try is SetForegroundWindow() in case you want to activate a window belonging to another application but this has its problems as you see from below (directly from the documentation):

The system restricts which processes can set the foreground window. A
process can set the foreground window only if one of the following
conditions is true:

• The process is the foreground process.
• The process was started by the foreground process.
• The process received the last input event.
• There is no foreground process.
• The foreground process is being debugged.
• The foreground is not locked (see LockSetForegroundWindow).
• The foreground lock time-out has expired (see SPI_GETFOREGROUNDLOCKTIMEOUT in SystemParametersInfo).
• No menus are active.