Windows 10 VirtualDesktop/Task View in VB/C#

Question

Referring to https://github.com/MScholtes/VirtualDesktop/issues/15

I'm looking to do 3 things programmatically, specifically:

1. How to activate task view, i.e. Win-Tab
2. How to deactivate task view
3. How to tell if we are currently in task view

I was able to bring up task view by running the following in a command prompt:

explorer shell:::{3080F90E-D7AD-11D9-BD98-0000947B0257}

But is starting a process in C# every single time I need task view the best approach? I prefer a programmatic way of calling some functions etc. I tried the following for activating, but it did nothing

public static readonly Guid CLSID_taskview = new Guid("3080F90E-D7AD-11D9-BD98-0000947B0257");
Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetTypeFromCLSID(Guids.CLSID_taskview));

Thank you.

Answer 1

I found a way to activate Task View without needing to launch a process:

ShellExecuteA(NULL, "open", "shell:::{3080F90E-D7AD-11D9-BD98-0000947B0257}", NULL, NULL, SW_SHOWDEFAULT);

The same call can be used to deactivate it as well.

To see if the Task View is open, it looks like you can get a handle to the current foreground window and check its class name, like so:

bool IsTaskViewOpen() {
    WCHAR className[100];
    HWND foreground = GetForegroundWindow();
    
    if (!foreground) {
        return false;
    }
    
    GetClassName(foreground, className, 100);
    return wcscmp(className, L"MultitaskingViewFrame") == 0;
}

I haven't tested that function extensively, so I don't know if it works in all cases.