Keep window on top and steal focus in WinForms

Question

I realize that this would be COMPLETELY bad practice in normal situations, but this is just for a test app that needs to be taking input from a bar code scanner (emulating a

Answer 1

I had a similar problem and found the following to do the trick. Adapted to C# from here

        // force window to have focus
        uint foreThread = GetWindowThreadProcessId(GetForegroundWindow(), IntPtr.Zero);
        uint appThread = GetCurrentThreadId();
        const uint SW_SHOW = 5;
        if (foreThread != appThread)
        {
            AttachThreadInput(foreThread, appThread, true);
            BringWindowToTop(form.Handle);
            ShowWindow(form.Handle, SW_SHOW);
            AttachThreadInput(foreThread, appThread, false);
        }
        else
        {
            BringWindowToTop(form.Handle);
            ShowWindow(form.Handle, SW_SHOW);
        }
        form.Activate();

EDIT: Here are the necessary PInvoke definitions for C#:

[DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
static extern uint GetWindowThreadProcessId(IntPtr hWnd, out uint lpdwProcessId);

// When you don't want the ProcessId, use this overload and pass IntPtr.Zero for the second parameter
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern uint GetWindowThreadProcessId(IntPtr hWnd, IntPtr ProcessId);

[DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
static extern uint GetCurrentThreadId();

/// 
The GetForegroundWindow function returns a handle to the foreground window.
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
private static extern IntPtr GetForegroundWindow();

[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern bool AttachThreadInput(uint idAttach, uint idAttachTo, bool fAttach);

[DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
static extern bool BringWindowToTop(IntPtr hWnd);

[DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
static extern bool BringWindowToTop(HandleRef hWnd);

[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern bool ShowWindow(IntPtr hWnd, uint nCmdShow);