I’ve been working on this for a few days and have finally got it doing what it is supposed to do, so thought I would post it here in case it helps someone else out. Basically this VB.NET code will get the command line for an external process, even if your application did not start that process (which is the limitation you have if you try using Process.StartInfo). This gets the full command line that was used to start the process so it includes the path to the executable and any command line arguments / parameters specified.
Archives For VB.NET – General
I recently needed to get the command line arguments that an external process was started with (one that was not started by my application, svchost.exe to be specific) and found that the only way I could get this information was with Windows APIs. The API in question just returned pointers that references locations in the memory of the external process (which meant I could not use the .NET Marshal methods as they would treat the pointers as references to my own process’s memory – thanks to wj32 for helping me understand that) so I had to use the Windows API ReadProcessMemory. I will be posting my full example of how to get the command line parameters for an external process soon but for now I thought I would just post this .NET class I wrote that makes reading process memory a bit easier as it does all of the API work for you.
Well I’ve just spent ages trying to figure out how to get the window icon (the icon displayed in the title bar at the far left) for an external program window from a VB.NET app – tried using GetClassInfo, GetClassInfoEx, GetClassLong, GetWindowLong and a few other APIs… only to find that you can simply use SendMessage to send the WM_GETICON message and it returns a handle to the icon – and this works perfectly *for most windows* (I’ll explain in a moment). So for anyone else wanting to do the same thing in the future, here’s a basic vb.net example of how to get the window icon from a window.
Here’s yet another .NET wrapper/helper that I’ve written for some Windows API functionality. This time my code makes use of about 6 different Windows APIs to provide you with a method that will return a list of all windows that are currently open on the computer along with their handle, title bar text, class name and the process that owns the window.
Also might be worth mentioning: I’m going to be releasing a class library soon full of lots of these “.NET friendly” methods that I’ve written to make calling specific Windows APIs simpler and easier. So you can just add a reference to the class library DLL and then you can avoid having to use the APIs directly as you can just use my nice simple .NET methods, with no need to marshal anything across to unmanaged code. Check back on this blog soon if that sounds like something you would be interested in.
As I demonstrated how to map a network drive in my last post, it seems like it might be a good idea to explain how to delete an existing mapped drive as well. Again we have to rely on Windows APIs to do this… but its a pretty simple one this time (for once).
There is no .NET method for creating a network drive yet (as of .NET 4.0) so here is how you can do it using good old Windows APIs 🙂 As well as the API definitions, I’ve included a managed method that wraps up the functionality of the API so that it is easier to use from .NET code.
Here is the full source code for a DLL that I have written that can be used to get all installed programs (just like Add or Remove Programs in Windows) on either the local computer or a remote computer on the network (and an example application that uses the DLL).
