如何在Visual Studio的特定实例（2008）中打开源文件

Question

I have several instances of Visual Studio 2008 opened and I want to open a source file in a specific instance. I plan to do this with Win32 API and something like ShellExecute(...) , but I can't find solution yet.

Is there any way to do so? Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Unless the application opening the file (VS2008) has a message handler set up to initiate opening a file (not sure if it does or not; this would be the easiest method), you could probably simulate a drag-and-drop of the file to the application's client area (via message sending directly to the client window's message handler). You would need to get a handle to the client window of VS2008 for the instance you are sending the message to.

Don't know what the purpose would be, though. You can generally call up a new instance to open the file using ShellExecute(), but that wouldn't refer to a specific instance that is already running.

Another method you might consider is to hook VS2008's message handler for the main window, and log all messages sent relating to menu commands. You might be able to determine if there is a message event associated with opening a file. Figuring out the parameters sent to the WndProc() function would be another story. Hopefully it would be sent as a string pointer (for the filename) to lParam.

Answer 2

You could try using AutoHotKey . It's got a built-in scripting language and has various alternative ways of identifying which application to send its messages to.