mikkon
asked on
How to GetWindowText() without sending
I need to get the window caption of any window in the system. To avoid trouble with calling GetWindowText() on hung applications, I'd like to read the window title directly without sending it WM_GETTEXT. Is this possible?
I know I could use SendMessageCallback() but I wouldn't like to go into all that trouble. Simple tests with Microsoft Spy++ showed that it was capable of reading window titles of hung applications.
I know I could use SendMessageCallback() but I wouldn't like to go into all that trouble. Simple tests with Microsoft Spy++ showed that it was capable of reading window titles of hung applications.
Spy++ works differently. It has a hook that watches the window messages so it can save the information before it hangs. It may also have access to hidden information (undocumented information).
Looking at Spy source code - it seems to use GetWindowText.
I think you can still use GetWindowText, to avoid hanging, you can create a number of threads, each thread will can this API, your main thread can monitor the behaviour of them and decide to let a hanging thread terminate and create a new one. Of course, this is somehow complex to implement.
ASKER
Messing with several threads would be much more difficult than using SendMessageCallback().
I tested this with Spy++ (no source available, I guess?) so that I hung my application and then started Spy. It was capable of reading the title of my hung application so it probably uses some undocumented features. :-(
I tested this with Spy++ (no source available, I guess?) so that I hung my application and then started Spy. It was capable of reading the title of my hung application so it probably uses some undocumented features. :-(
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