Comments by Craig Haywood (Top 17 by date)

I just want to say thank you to everybody who tried to help. I am not going to waste anymore time on this.

It would be nice if I can use my set topmost function as a toggle topmost on or off but unfortunately it doesn't make sense spending two days researching something I can already do with two different functions as opposed to one.

I'm starting to think this is just not possible in vb or C#

Imports System.Runtime.InteropServices

Public Class Form1
<DllImport("user32.dll", EntryPoint:="GetWindowLongPtrW")> _
Public Shared Function GetWindowLongPtrW(ByVal hWnd As HandleRef, ByVal nIndex As Integer) As IntPtr

End Function
Private Sub Form1_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
Dim notepad As Process = Process.GetProcessesByName("notepad")(0)
Dim hWnd As IntPtr = notepad.MainWindowHandle
Dim notepad2 As New HandleRef(0, hWnd)
Dim Style As IntPtr = GetWindowLongPtrW(notepad2, -20)
MsgBox(Style.ToString)

End Sub
End Class

Additional information: Unable to find an entry point named 'GetWindowLongPtrW' in DLL 'user32.dll'.

GetWindowLongPtr gives a first chance exception of type 'System.EntryPointNotFoundException'

Imports System.Runtime.InteropServices

Public Class Form1
<DllImport("user32.dll")> _
Private Shared Function GetWindowLongPtr(ByVal hWnd As IntPtr, ByVal nIndex As Integer) As IntPtr
End Function
Private Sub Form1_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
Dim notepad As Process = Process.GetProcessesByName("notepad")(0)
Dim hWnd As IntPtr = notepad.MainWindowHandle
Dim GWL_EXSTYLE As IntPtr = -20
Dim WS_EX_TOPMOST As IntPtr = 8
Dim Style As IntPtr = GetWindowLongPtr(hWnd, GWL_EXSTYLE)
End Sub
End Class

Thanks @BillWoodruff. I am searching global hooks now

From everything I have read, this seems to be the approach, in my tests, GetWindowLong always returns 0. Maybe somebody here can get it to work on both 32bit and 64bit machines

I am using the global hook at https://globalmousekeyhook.codeplex.com/.

As for my dilemma, from reading a lot of articles, it seems as if I need to use GetWindowLong to find the topmost state of an external app. However, from http://www.pinvoke.net it seems as if this is a mess in vb or c#, especially if used between 32bit and 64bit machines.

Anyway, I have tried it, but GetWindowLong always returns 0 for me.

I am writing an application that amongst other thing will perform global mouse gestures. I want users to be able to assign their own actions to the gestures and also provide a few built in functions.

One of these functions will be to toggle an external window's topmost state. Of course I can have an action that sets the topmost state to true and another that sets it to false. It just seems ridiculous to use two different gestures to do basically the same thing.

If I can find out the topmost state of an external application, then I can use one gesture to toggle it on when it is set to false and off when it is set to true

Nothing as yet as I do not know how. That's why I am asking

This can be any external window that is not part of my application. Whether it is winforms or wpf is irrelevant. I know how to set the topmost state of an external window as well as how to remove it, but in order to create a toggle function in my application, I first need to get the current topmost state for the external window.

Read the question. I think I explained what I mean with friendly name

I am actually looking for a solution on how to do this in code, not to make use of another third party program.