How to re-use existing/already-opened Windows Expl

问题:

I have an application that makes frequent use of launching explorer.exe. I would like to re-use existing/already-opened explorer windows instead of creating a new one each time I start the process.

Here is what my code looks like:

System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo info = new System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo
{
    UseShellExecute = true,
    FileName = "Explorer.exe",
    Arguments = myDirectoryPath
};
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(info);

I didn't see a command-line switch to do this. One approach I tried was to simply kill any 1 existing explorer process and replace it with a new one:

var processes = System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcesses(Environment.MachineName);int kills = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < processes.Length; i++)
{
    System.Diagnostics.Process p = processes[i];
    if (p.ProcessName == "explorer" && kills < 1)
        ++kills
    p.Kill();
}

But this results in the unwanted effect of not just killing 1 process, but killing explorer completely so that even the taskbar disappears.

So, how do you use an existing Explorer window, if one exists, to start Explorer?

回答1:

The IShellWindows COM interface will give you a list of open explorer windows, you can get and set the address of any explorer window, see this blog entry for a C++ sample. I doubt .NET has a native implementation of this, so you probably need to PInvoke

回答2:

Another option would be to (if you don't know the HWND of the explorer window you already opened/want to reuse) enumerate and find the window with a title that "looks like" what you want, then instruct that window to come to the foreground. It wouldn't reveal the exact file you want in it, but it might be simpler than other options :)