Detecting idle users in Winforms

Question

I'd like to pause my program if a user is inactive for 5 minutes. By inactive I mean hasn't pressed their mouse or their keyboard during that time (including outside the program too!). Any starting points?

Answer 1

Within a timer you could p/invoke GetLastInputInfo() which will return the number ms since input was detected from the user, across all processes in the current session.

Answer 2

This question is very similar to an old question:

.NET equivalent for GetLastInputInfo?

Which referenced a good article describing some different options in C#:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/uim.aspx

If you don't mind using P/Invoke and being limited to running on windows systems, then using P/Invoke to call GetLastInputInfo() is probably the simplest method of accomplishing what you want.

Answer 3

you could override the WndProc and look for the WM_IDLE message

Answer 4

I've used the GMA.UserActivityMonitor library a while ago to achieve this.