How to Bring My Application Window to the Front

How can I bring my application window to the front?

Use Control.BringToFront:

myForm.BringToFront();

Bring another application to front

[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("User32.dll")]
private static extern bool SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr handle);

private IntPtr handle;

private void button4_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Process[] processName = Process.GetProcessesByName("ProgramName");
if (processName.Length == 0)
{
//Start application here
Process.Start("C:\\bin\\ProgramName.exe");
}
else
{
//Set foreground window
handle = processName[0].MainWindowHandle;
SetForegroundWindow(handle);
}
}

If you also wish to show the window even if it is minimized, use:

if (IsIconic(handle))
ShowWindow(handle, SW_RESTORE);

What is the right way to bring a Windows Forms Application to the foreground?

Have you tried Form.Activate?

This code seems to do what you want, by restoring the form to normal size if minimized and then activating it to set the focus:

if (this.WindowState == FormWindowState.Minimized)
{
this.WindowState = FormWindowState.Normal;
}

this.Activate();

Warning: this is annoying! If it's just an app for your personal use, as you say, maybe you can live with it. :)

What's the correct way to bring a window to the front

Your process needs to satisfy a few conditions for it to be able to set the foreground window.

This is to prevent applications from stealing focus - which is a very bad user experience.

Imagine you're writing an email, and halfway through it your application decides now would be a good time to push a window into foreground. As you're typing suddenly the focused window would instantly change and your keypresses would now be sent to your program instead of the mail program. Not only could this cause all sorts of havoc (the keys you pressed are now sent to your program, so hotkeys might get triggered, dialogs dismissed, etc...) - but it would also be a really frustrating experience for the user (especially for less technically-inclined people).

That is the reason why SetForegroundWindow() & similar functions sometimes won't push your window to the foreground, but still report success. Your window will still flash in the task bar though, so users know that something happened in your application.



SetForegroundWindow

The exact list of conditions that need to be met for SetForegroundWindow() to work are detailed in 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.

An application cannot force a window to the foreground while the user is working with another window ¹. Instead, Windows flashes the taskbar button of the window to notify the user.

1 this is what prevents the mail program example detailed above from happening.

A process that fulfills these criteria can also "share" its permission to set the foreground window with another process by calling AllowSetForegroundWindow()



SetActiveWindow

SetActiveWindow() only works if the targeted window is attached to your message queue and one of your application windows is currently the foreground window.

Activates a window. The window must be attached to the calling thread's message queue.

The window will be brought into the foreground (top of Z-Order) if its application is in the foreground when the system activates the window.



BringWindowToTop

BringWindowToTop() is a convenience function for SetWindowPos(), which again has the same restrictions:

If an application is not in the foreground, and should be in the foreground, it must call the SetForegroundWindow function.

To use SetWindowPos to bring a window to the top, the process that owns the window must have SetForegroundWindow permission.



Using UI Automation

Since you mentioned that you need this functionality for an accessibility tool, here's how you could accomplish this using UI Automation:

This example uses bare-bones COM for simplicity, but if you want you can of course use e.g. wil for a more C++-like API.

#include <uiautomation.h>

bool MoveWindowToForeground(IUIAutomation* pAutomation, HWND hWnd) {
// retrieve an ui automation handle for a given window
IUIAutomationElement* element = nullptr;
HRESULT result = pAutomation->ElementFromHandle(hWnd, &element);
if (FAILED(result))
return false;

// move the window into the foreground
result = element->SetFocus();

// cleanup
element->Release();
return SUCCEEDED(result);
}

int main()
{
// initialize COM, only needs to be done once per thread
CoInitialize(nullptr);

// create the UI automation object
IUIAutomation* pAutomation = nullptr;
HRESULT result = CoCreateInstance(CLSID_CUIAutomation, NULL, CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, IID_IUIAutomation, reinterpret_cast<LPVOID*>(&pAutomation));
if (FAILED(result))
return 1;

// move the given window into the foreground
HWND hWnd = FindWindowW(nullptr, L"Calculator");
MoveWindowToForeground(pAutomation, hWnd);

// cleanup
pAutomation->Release();
CoUninitialize();

return 0;
}

How to bring my application to the front?

You can't do this reliably. Windows XP had a workaround that would allow it, but versions since then prohibit it for the most part (see note below). This is expressly stated in the remarks section of the MSDN documentation on SetForegroundWindow:

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.

An application cannot force a window to the foreground while the user is working with another window. Instead, Windows flashes the taskbar button of the window to notify the user.

Note the final paragraph of the quoted documentation, especially the first sentence.

The problem with

this is for purely personal use and I want it to happen; it will not disturb anything.

is that any application could try to do the same thing. How does "purely personal use" tell it's you personally and not just any application? :-)

Note: I've tried everything I can think of to get the IDE's documentation to show in the foreground when I click the help toolbutton, but all I can get is the flashing taskbar button (and I as the user want it to do so).

Bring a window to the front in WPF

Well I figured out a work around. I'm making the call from a keyboard hook used to implement a hotkey. The call works as expected if I put it into a BackgroundWorker with a pause. It's a kludge, but I have no idea why it wasn't working originally.

void hotkey_execute()
{
IntPtr handle = new WindowInteropHelper(Application.Current.MainWindow).Handle;
BackgroundWorker bg = new BackgroundWorker();
bg.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(delegate
{
Thread.Sleep(10);
SwitchToThisWindow(handle, true);
});
bg.RunWorkerAsync();
}

How can I bring the main WPF window to the front?

Try this code

 Dispatcher.Invoke(() =>
{
this.Activate();
this.WindowState = System.Windows.WindowState.Normal;
this.Topmost = true;
this.Focus();
});

VB.net Bring Window to Front

It should be enough that you set property TopMost of the window that you need to get on the top of the others.

Form.TopMost = True

How to bring a window to the front?

A possible solution is:

java.awt.EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
@Override
public void run() {
myFrame.toFront();
myFrame.repaint();
}
});


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