Alternative to SendKeys when running over Remote Desktop?

Question

I have an application which injects keystrokes into applications via SendKeys.

Unfortunately, the application will not work when I am running it via Remote Desktop because of the well known issue that SendKeys doesn't work with Remote Desktop.

Has anyone solved this issue before, or have any good suggestions on how to resolve it?

Answer 1

SendKeys is not a good fit mainly due to:

• It can only send keys to active/focused application, which is never guaranteed to work because the the active application can change between the time the keys are actually sent.
• RDP and many other libraries (e.g., DirectX) block them mainly for security reasons.

Better alternatives:

• Use SendMessage or SendInput for simple needs
• Some good examples of how to use SendMessage can be found:
  • Send strings to another application by using Windows messages
  • SendMessage via pInvoke
  • How To Send Keystrokes To Extern Win Application
• For more elaborate needs, it is recommended to use WCF
• To get you started, read this Basic Tutorial that talks about Inter Process Communication

Sample code using SendMessage:

HWND hwndNotepad = FindWindow(_T("Notepad"), NULL);
HWND hwndEdit = FindWindowEx(hwndNotepad, NULL, _T("Edit"), NULL);
SendMessage(hwndEdit, WM_SETTEXT, NULL, (LPARAM)_T("hello"));