steal or transfer focus   

I'm not sure if this is the right newsgroup.  If it's not, and you can 
recommend another microsoft.* newsgroup where I should post this, I would 
appreciate it.

Everyone knows it's a capital offense for an application to steal focus. 
Remember how mad you get when you're typing away in your document, with a 
patch install going on in the background, and when the install completes, 
and it pops up a dialog asking you to reboot.  You don't notice the dialog 
in time and happened to type an 'n' character that was intended for your 
document.  Instead, it is taken as a Reboot _N_ow, and your computer 
reboots, losing huge amounts of work in the process.  Well, there are many 
other examples, but you get the idea.

What I want to be able to do, though, is for one application to GIVE (or 
transfer) focus to another one.  Say I've got AppA.exe and AppB.exe.  They 
play nicely together, and maybe even appear next to each other.  Let's say 
that AppA is running and has focus.  User clicks a button on AppA, and we 
want focus to transfer to AppB.  We do NOT want AppB to flash, telling the 
user it wants focus, we just want the focus there immediately.  This isn't a 
case of AppB trying to steal focus.  AppA has the focus, and it wants to 
"pass the baton" to AppB.  Can this be done without having to modify the 
HKEY_CurrentUser\Control Panel\Desktop : ForegroundLockTimeout value, which 
affects every other application in the system?

date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 11:33:54 -0800   author:   Mickey Ferguson