How to activate a window of an external application

Question

I've used FindWindow to get a handle to a window of an external application. How can I use this handle to activate the window of the external application, if it is minimized or behind other applications on the windows desktop?

Answer 1

FindWindow() followed by ShowWindow().

Answer 2

To prevent focus-stealing (or at least make accidental focus-stealing harder), Windows puts up some roadblocks to one process bringing another process's window to the top.

Check MSDN for SetForegroundWindow (especially in the Remarks section) and AllowSetForegroundWindow.

You should either send a message to the process to tell it to restore its own window, or that process has to explicitly allow your process to do this.