Internet Explorer 8.
Just wanted to give a heads up to all experts about a problem I ran into this morning.
It appears that any attempt to launch IE with Shell(), CreateProcess(), Process.Start when additional instances are already open return the wrong PID.
At first I thought it was CreateProcess, so I tried to use the Shell command, that didn't work, so I fired up .NET and even that failed.
It works fine if and only you are launching the first instance. However if you already have an instance open and you try to use any of the above it will return the wrong PID.
This causes unpredicatable results especially if you want to use the PID to find the main window handle of the application you just launched. As an example if you tried to use the return PID from any of these calls to either walk the hWnds or EnumWindows() it will never find the correct match. This is the problem I ran into which lead to this discovery.
Open for suggestions in the mean time trying to find a solution that would return the correct PID.
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Hi jaime, unfortunately that has the same side effects :(
The first instance returns fine. But trying to launch additional instances returns wrong PID. It's like IE is magically changing the PID. I think its the new crash dump feature thats giving this behavior but I am just shooting in the dark with that.
notice that in:
int PID = Process.GetProcessesByName
GetProcessesByName returns an array of processes
In my example I am retrieving the first item, but you can retrieve the las item as:
Process[] allprocs = Process.GetProcessesByName
int PID = allprocs[allprocs.Length-1
I can't seem to get any of them to work right. Enumerating them afterwards does work but how would I know which instance I just launched if the PID thats returning isn't the actual PID that I see in task manager. In fact sometimes the PID that returns doesn't even exist in the task manager.
What I am trying to do is return the hWnd (MainWindowHandle) of the instance I just launched but I can't match up the PID to identify the instance. WaitForInputIdle into MainWindowHandle seems to fail. Same with the former API calls when I use CreatedProcess, WaitForInputIdle, PROCESS_INFORMATION returns the wrong PID.
Does it work for you?
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by: jaime_olivaresPosted on 2009-08-02 at 17:14:38ID: 25001247
have you tried with the following?:
Process instance = new Process();
instance .StartInfo.FileName = "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe");
instance .Start();
int PID = Process.GetProcessesByName