Send or post a message to a Windows Forms message loop

Question

I have a thread that reads messages from a named pipe. It is a blocking read, which is why it\'s in its own thread. When this thread reads a message, I want it to notify the Win

Answer 1

PostMessage (and likewise SendMessage) are Win32 API functions, and thus are not directly associated with .NET. .NET does however have good support for interoping with the Win32 API, using P/Invoke calls.

As it seems you are new to doing Win32 programming .NET, this MSDN Magazine article provides a solid introduction on the topic.

The excellent pinvoke.net website details how to use many of these API functions from C#/VB.NET. See this page for PostMessage specifically.

The standard declaration is the following:

[DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
static extern bool PostMessage(HandleRef hWnd, uint Msg, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam);

But as the page indicates, it is wise to wrap this function to handle Win32 errors properly:

void PostMessageSafe(HandleRef hWnd, uint msg, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam)
{
    bool returnValue = PostMessage(hWnd, msg, wParam, lParam);
    if(!returnValue)
    {
        // An error occured
        throw new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error());
    }
}