Accesibility Keyboard Application

[petinboy]

Hi All!

I am developing an accessibility keyboard application with Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition and with C#. The application is a keyboard with buttons that interacts with any application on windows, such as Word, Messenger, IExplorer... The keyboard is on the bottom of the desktop and the other application is on the top of the desktop.

The keyboard interacts with other applications using the SendKeys class. When I send keystrokes to the other application, the other application lose the focus and i have to put the focus to that application. In windows, in start -> programs -> accesories-> accesibility there is a keyboard that do not need have got the focus to send keystrokes to other application. How i can do that? I need that my accesibility keyboard interacts with other applications, and these applications do not lose the focus.

In other words, i need that my keyboard have not got the focus, but when i click on one button, the button sends the keystroke to the other application.

Thanks for your help.

[Plater]

I think there is a method similar to sendkeys that takes a WindowHandle parameter.
I think it's done using the Message class, but I'm not positive

[petinboy]

Hi Plater,
I was searching about Message class, IMessageFilter class and much more without success.
However, I found the solution to the problem by another way.
I change the form style and add the WS_EX_NOACTIVATE to prevent it getting focus overriding the CreateParams property like below:

protected override CreateParams CreateParams
{
get
{
const int WS_EX_NOACTIVATE = 0x08000000;
CreateParams param = base.CreateParams;
param.ExStyle = param.ExStyle | WS_EX_NOACTIVATE;
return param;
}
}

Now, I can interacts with any Windows Application without "flashes" because my application never gets the focus and click on button works fine.

Thanks for your help.