How to get main window handle from process id?

Solution 1:

I checked how .NET determines the main window.

My finding showed that it also uses EnumWindows().

This code should do it similarly to the .NET way:

struct handle_data {
    unsigned long process_id;
    HWND window_handle;
};

HWND find_main_window(unsigned long process_id)
{
    handle_data data;
    data.process_id = process_id;
    data.window_handle = 0;
    EnumWindows(enum_windows_callback, (LPARAM)&data);
    return data.window_handle;
}

BOOL CALLBACK enum_windows_callback(HWND handle, LPARAM lParam)
{
    handle_data& data = *(handle_data*)lParam;
    unsigned long process_id = 0;
    GetWindowThreadProcessId(handle, &process_id);
    if (data.process_id != process_id || !is_main_window(handle))
        return TRUE;
    data.window_handle = handle;
    return FALSE;   
}

BOOL is_main_window(HWND handle)
{   
    return GetWindow(handle, GW_OWNER) == (HWND)0 && IsWindowVisible(handle);
}

Solution 2:

I don't believe Windows (as opposed to .NET) provides a direct way to get that.

The only way I know of is to enumerate all the top level windows with EnumWindows() and then find what process each belongs to GetWindowThreadProcessID(). This sounds indirect and inefficient, but it's not as bad as you might expect -- in a typical case, you might have a dozen top level windows to walk through...

Solution 3:

There's the possibility of a mis-understanding here. The WinForms framework in .Net automatically designates the first window created (e.g., Application.Run(new SomeForm())) as the MainWindow. The win32 API, however, doesn't recognize the idea of a "main window" per process. The message loop is entirely capable of handling as many "main" windows as system and process resources will let you create. So, your process doesn't have a "main window". The best you can do in the general case is use EnumWindows() to get all the non-child windows active on a given process and try to use some heuristics to figure out which one is the one you want. Luckily, most processes are only likely to have a single "main" window running most of the time, so you should get good results in most cases.