How to press the Windows button programmatically using C# SendKeys

Question

Basically I want to simulate in code a user clicking on the windows button. I know there is SendKeys which allows me to send key presses to windows if I get a handle to them

Answer 1

Some of the things that a user would do via a WinKey shortcut can be done programmatically in other ways. To take your WinKey+L example, you could instead just use the following statement:

Process.Start("rundll32.exe", "user32.dll,LockWorkStation");

If you could elaborate on what exactly you're trying to accomplish, maybe there's a better way than keybd_event (as Dale has suggested).

Answer 2

You need to use a global keyboard hook to hook into keyboards outside your application. There's an article on how to do it here.

Answer 3

I don't think you can do this using SendKeys, you will need to p/invoke to an API function instead, probably keybd_event to send either CTRL+ESC or the Windows key.

Here is an example of opening the start menu this way in VB and here is keybd_event with its C# signature on pinvoke.net.