To get the text of an external window you could use the GetForegroundWindow
and the GetWindowText
API functions. Here is a small example of its usage:
public partial class Form1 : Form { [DllImport("user32.dll")] static extern int GetForegroundWindow(); [DllImport("user32.dll")] static extern int GetWindowText(int hWnd, StringBuilder text, int count); //Use SetWindowPos to make app alwaysontop public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); } private void GetActiveWindow() { const int nChars = 256; int handle = 0; StringBuilder Buff = new StringBuilder(nChars); handle = GetForegroundWindow(); if (GetWindowText(handle, Buff, nChars) 0) { this.captionWindowLabel.Text = Buff.ToString(); this.IDWindowLabel.Text = handle.ToString(); } } private void timer1_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e) { GetActiveWindow(); } }