Program Control, HELP appreciated.

I am trying to start writing a program to control another program ( in a sense).

e.g. i have one internet explorer window open, and my program has a button on it saying HOME, clicking it makes my internet explorer window go to it's homepage (so it thinks the user has pressed the home button on IE).

Now im not sure how legal this is, but please, ANY help would be appreciated as to how i would go about STARTING to write this program (internet explorer was just an example).

I have intermediate to advanced knowledge of C++.

http://faq.cprogramming.com/cgi-bin/...&id=1043284392

Every program will have its individual way of being controlled. It might expose a cross-process scripting interface. It might have a special command line interface. It might have a published set of messages it reacts to (Winamp did that). Or it might expose nothing, and you have to simulate mouse clicks and key presses to get it to do what you want.

This is really special-case programming, and there is no general answer.

First you need one of the many "winspy" programs which allow you to trace which messages are sent to which application. Use this to figure out which event IE sends to itself in response to the home button being pressed. This you can then use in your application.

Then use the win32 SendMessage() API to send that message to IE.
Use some other win32 API calls to find out the appropriate handles to IE.

ah Ok. so:

Code:

---

        LRESULT SendMessage(HWND hWnd,
                            UINT Msg,
                            WPARAM wParam,
                            LPARAM lParam);

---

where it says hWnd would i have to find the handle to the HOME button?
and where it says Msg would i put WM_LBUTTON?

Also, how do i work out the handle of the button?(would it be via spy++?) And in what form would the handle appear?

EDIT: possibly this should be moved to the Windows Programming section of the forums :)

Internet explorer exports a lot of interfaces that can be used directly without workaround with sending messages to the buttons (buttons can be removed by the user for example)

Maybe you should start with reading this http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...new_70_sdk.asp
and this http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...node_entry.asp

> where it says hWnd would i have to find the handle to the HOME button?
No, it would be the window of IE itself, or some sub-window of IE which contain the home button.
First you find the window containing IE itself, then possibly enumerate all the sub-windows of IE until you get to the one containing the HOME button.

A better method (which I know nothing about) would be to use the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) interface, which is specifically designed for inter-application communication.
Here is an initial search to get you started.

Thankyou.