Is there a method to retrieve all open windows of my app?

[fabianoriccardi]

I was looking for a (possibly easy) method to retrieve all the opened Windows of my app. Currently, I can manually register all the opened windows in a global static List, but it would be great to have a native structure that keeps track of them.

I was looking for something similar to Application.Current.Windows in .NET4.8 (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/app-development/how-to-get-all-windows-in-an-application?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8).

[Yewzir]

@fabianoriccardi

It's been a while, but I think the Windows API contains definitions for the methods WindowEnum and ChildWindowEnum. There's certainly GetWindow too, but that method was less favorable to use for some reason, if I recall that somewhat correctly.

Edit: I looked it up and the methods are EnumWindows and EnumChildWindows, GetWindow was correct and is indeed less favorable to use than EnumWindows.

EnumWindows function (winuser.h)

Enumerates all top-level windows on the screen by passing the handle to each window, in turn, to an application-defined callback function. EnumWindows continues until the last top-level window is enumerated or the callback function returns FALSE.

EnumChildWindows function (winuser.h)

Enumerates the child windows that belong to the specified parent window by passing the handle to each child window, in turn, to an application-defined callback function. EnumChildWindows continues until the last child window is enumerated or the callback function returns FALSE.

GetWindow function (winuser.h)

Retrieves a handle to a window that has the specified relationship (Z-Order or owner) to the specified window.

The header winuser.h contains several methods regarding windows, and you might certainly want to browse through them, because there may be more possibilities than the few I listed here.

Kind regards
@Yewzir

[fabianoriccardi]

Thanks for the reply @Yewzir, you are not too late.

I didn't exactly know these methods, but in the first post I had written "easy" because I was supposing that the low-level APIs would provide such feature, but I was looking for something "native" in Windows App SDK.

=> The developers may add it in the next releases.

[Yewzir]

@fabianoriccardi

What programming language are you targeting specifically?

[fabianoriccardi]

C#