📢 We are actively seeking collaborators to help maintain and improve this project!
This library was created 10+ years ago when I was actively working on Windows services. I have since moved on to other things, and I'm not in a position to easily maintain this project, which is still actively used by the community. If you are interested in helping, please reach out!
This uses the Win32 apis to:
- Find the currently active user session
- Spawn a new process in that session
This allows a process running in a different session (such as a windows service) to start a process with a graphical user interface that the user must see.
Note that the process must have the appropriate (admin) privileges for this to work correctly. For WTSQueryUserToken you will need the SE_TCB_NAME privilege, which is typically only held by Services running under the LocalSystem account ( SO Link ).
using murrayju.ProcessExtensions;
// ...
ProcessExtensions.StartProcessAsCurrentUser("calc.exe");The second argument is used to pass the command line arguments as a string. Depending on the target application, argv[0] might be expected to be the executable name, or it might be the first parameter. See this stack overflow answer for details. When in doubt, try it both ways.