HWnd of Visual Studio 2010

Question

Is there a way to get the HWnd pointer to the top window of Visual Studio 2010 from a VSIX extension? (I would like to change the title of the window).

Answer 1

You can use the EnvDTE API to get the HWnd of main window:

var hwndMainWindow = (IntPtr) dte.MainWindow.HWnd;

In Visual Studio 2010/ 2012, the main window and part of user controls implemented using WPF. You can immediately get the WPF window of main window and work with it. I wrote the following extension method for this:

public static Window GetWpfMainWindow(this EnvDTE.DTE dte)
{
  if (dte == null)
  {
    throw new ArgumentNullException("dte");
  }

  var hwndMainWindow = (IntPtr)dte.MainWindow.HWnd;
  if (hwndMainWindow == IntPtr.Zero)
  {
    throw new NullReferenceException("DTE.MainWindow.HWnd is null.");
  }

  var hwndSource = HwndSource.FromHwnd(hwndMainWindow);
  if (hwndSource == null)
  {
    throw new NullReferenceException("HwndSource for DTE.MainWindow is null.");
  }

  return (Window) hwndSource.RootVisual;
}

Answer 2

Since there are good chances that your VSIX extension will be running in-process with Visual Studio, you should try this:

System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().MainWindowHandle

(Note if you do this too early, you'll get VS Splash screen ...)

Answer 3

I'm assuming you want to do this programatically in C#?

You'll need to define this P/Invoke inside your class:

[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern int SetWindowText(IntPtr hWnd, string text);

Then have some code that looks similar to the following:

Process visualStudioProcess = null;
//Process[] allProcesses = Process.GetProcessesByName("VCSExpress"); // Only do this if you know the exact process name
// Grab all of the currently running processes
Process[] allProcesses = Process.GetProcesses();
foreach (Process process in allProcesses)
{
    // My process is called "VCSExpress" because I have C# Express, but for as long as I've known, it's been called "devenv". Change this as required
    if (process.ProcessName.ToLower() == "vcsexpress" ||
        process.ProcessName.ToLower() == "devenv"
        /* Other possibilities*/)
    {
        // We have found the process we were looking for
        visualStudioProcess = process;
        break;
    }
}

// This is done outside of the loop because I'm assuming you may want to do other things with the process
if (visualStudioProcess != null)
{
    SetWindowText(visualStudioProcess.MainWindowHandle, "Hello World");
}

Doc on Process: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.process.aspx

Doc on P/Invoke: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288468%28VS.71%29.aspx

Trying this code on my local, it seems to set the window title, but Visual Studio overwrites it under many conditions: gains focus, enters/leaves debug mode... This could be troublesome.

Note: You can GET the window title straight from the Process object, but you can't set it.