Closing a minimized/iconized process from C#

Question

Here\'s my issue: I need to close a process, already running, from a C# program. The problem is that the process now runs as an icon (minimized to taskbar), and unless the u

Answer 1

If it's on the taskbar, it'll have a window. Or did you mean that it's in the taskbar notification area (aka the SysTray)? In which case, it'll still have a window.

Win32 applications don't really have a "main window", except by convention (the main window is the one that calls PostQuitMessage in response to WM_DESTROY, causing the message loop to exit).

With the program running, run Spy++. To find all of the windows owned by a process, you should select Spy -> Processes from the main menu. This will display a tree of processes. From there, you can drill down to threads, and then to windows. This will tell you which windows the process has. Note down the window class and caption. With these, you can use FindWindow (or EnumWindows) to find the window handle in future.

With the window handle, you can send a WM_CLOSE or WM_SYSCOMMAND/SC_CLOSE (equivalent to clicking on the 'X' on the window caption) message. This ought to cause the program to shut down nicely.

Note that I'm talking from a Win32 point-of-view here. You might need to use P/Invoke or other tricks to get this to work from a .NET program.