How to bind a hotkey

Question

I'm trying to create a program where I can press a hotkey while I'm in a game and the program will receive the key press and preform an action. I've tried following tutorials and looking at other questions, but they seem to not provide the functionality I want or the methods are outdated and I cannot use them without error.

Answer 1

You'll need to do this with WINAPI Interop. The technique is usually referred to as a global hook.

You'll want to handle the WM_KEYDOWN , WM_KEYUP, WM_SYSKEYDOWN, and WM_SYSKEYUP events. You can read up on WPF and Win32 specific interoperation here.

You can read up on planform invoke (PInvoke) here. Pinvoke is how you call unmanaged / native functions implemented in a dll from your .NET application.

For example, you can call the SetWindowsHookEx (Pinvoke) | (MSDN) method in the user32.dll to install an application hook.

IntPtr hHook;

using (Process process = Process.GetCurrentProcess())
using (ProcessModule module = process.MainModule)
{
    IntPtr hModule = GetModuleHandle(module.ModuleName);

    hHook = SetWindowsHookEx(HookType.WH_KEYBOARD_LL, hook, hModule, 0);
}

You can find Pinvoke signatures at this wiki site: http://www.pinvoke.net

Here is a minimal keyboard hook example.

Here is an example C# / WPF example that could help you get started.