Starting a windows-application with focus - winapi

Question

I'm writing a small Windows application in Visual C++ without MVC. Its really small, it just contains one textfield, an OK-Button and an Cancel-Button.
The application is started by a background-process when user starts printing. When opening the application doesn't get focus, isn't even visible.
For the user it's importend that the application is directly in focus, so they have as lease clicks as possible to use it.
I tried many many things to get the application in focus:
SetWindowPos(hWnd, HWND_TOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, SWP_NOMOVE | SWP_NOSIZE);
SetForegroundWindow(hWnd);
ShowWindow(hWnd, SW_RESTORE);
SetFocus(hWnd);
I even repeated this calls in a timer. All of this doesn't work. Now I found some remarks on MSDN:
The system restricts which processes can set the foreground window. A
process can set the foreground window only if one of the following
conditions is true:
The process is the foreground process.
The process was started by the foreground process.
The process received the last input event.
There is no foreground process.
The foreground process is being debugged.
The foreground is not locked (see LockSetForegroundWindow).
The foreground lock time-out has expired (see SPI_GETFOREGROUNDLOCKTIMEOUT in SystemParametersInfo).
No menus are active.
Anybody knows a workaround for this?

Answer 1

There is no workaround for this. The whole point of this new Windows behavior is to prevent applications from bringing themselves to the foreground on their own and being a nuisance. In your case, I would suggest using a notification icon and showing a balloon message when necessary instead of a window. However, even in this case your notification icon can be hidden by the user and there is no workaround, for the same reason as above.

Answer 2

Now, this is coming from a Java developer and not a Visual C++ developer, but can you maybe set the frame/window/whatever-its-called-in-visual-c to be always on top? In Java, if you have a JFrame, say myJFrame, you can call myJFrame.setAlwaysOnTop(true) and it stays on top of all other windows. This seems to be a simple workaround to your problem, however it may not be desirable for the user if it's blocking something of theirs on screen.

Answer 3

http://www.thescarms.com/vbasic/alttab.aspx seems to do the job
void forceToFront(HWND hWnd) {
HWND foregroundWindow = GetForegroundWindow();
if (foregroundWindow == hWnd) {
// Window is already Foreground-window
return;
}
if (SetForegroundWindow(hWnd)) {
// could set window to foreground without any tricks
return;
}
// attach thread of foreground-window to this window
DWORD foregroundThread = GetWindowThreadProcessId(foregroundWindow, NULL);
DWORD myThread = GetWindowThreadProcessId(hWnd, NULL);
AttachThreadInput(foregroundThread, myThread, true);
SetForegroundWindow(hWnd);
AttachThreadInput(foregroundThread, myThread, false);
}