Is it possible to run a window form application from another running window form application

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.NET2.0

Is it possible to run a window form application from another running window form application? If possible, then please help.Thanks

Posted 1-May-11 20:21pm

Varshney Manish

Updated 1-May-11 20:22pm

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2011-05-01T20:41:00

Pong provided the answer.
However, in this way the two processes cannot communicate.

I feel that you mean running one application inside the form of another one. If you don't have source code of both applications, it is not easy. If you have source codes, best you can do is re-work the code the way they run in one application and one process.

If you don't have the source code of "guest" or "child" application, I do not recommend addressing this problem — the good results are not guaranteed and hard to achieve.

1) You can run "child" application as a child process via System.Diagnostic.Process, get windows handles of the main forms of both application (use Process.MainWindowHandle to get the one of the child process) and P/Invoke and use Windows API function SetParent. The result depends on how child application works — this trick can be disruptive.

2) You can use Reflection to extract the class of the main form of using the "guest" application assembly of loaded through System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFrom. You can try to get the class of it's main form, instantiate it and add to your application's Application through Form.Show. In this way, you will have only one process, which is always better. The second assembly will be used as the library, not as a separate application with its own process. Solving this problem is not very easy and also could be disruptive to the functionality of the second assembly.

Again, trying any of those approaches is a matter of research. In certain cases it will work. In the general case the result is not guaranteed.

—SA

Pong D. Panda · Answer 2 · 2011-05-01T20:24:00

Solution 1

Yes it is. Try something like this.

System.Diagnostics.Process proc = new System.Diagnostics.Process();
proc.EnableRaisingEvents=false;
proc.StartInfo.FileName="c:\\codeproject\\test.exe";
proc.Start();

Posted 1-May-11 20:24pm

Pong D. Panda

Comments

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 2-May-11 2:44am

Good enough, this could work but is not very useful. Not your fault -- nmy 5 anyway.

I feel OP needs one application running inside the other one (because it is the usual question that was already answered few times).

So, please see my answer -- it's pretty interesting, not so practical though...
--SA