Getting inactivity/idle time in a WPF application

Question

I was looking for the best approach to find out the if my users are idle in my WPF application. Currently, I take this idle time from operating system, and if they minimize the application, and go and search in Internet, there is a process in the operating system, so Operation system does not consider this as inactivity time even though they are not doing anything inside the application. However, I would like to find out if they have not clicked or do anything inside my application.

This is how I can that idle time right now.

myApplication.MainMethod()
    {
        System.Windows.Forms.Timer myTimer = new System.Windows.Forms.Timer();
        myTimer .Interval = 1000;
        myTimer .Tick += new EventHandler(Timer_Tick);
        myTimer .Start();
    }

    void Timer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        int idleTime= (int)Win32.GetIdleTime();
        if (idleTime<certainNumber)
        {
         //do this
         }
    }

Answer 1

public MainWindow()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        ComponentDispatcher.ThreadIdle += new System.EventHandler(ComponentDispatcher_ThreadIdle);
    }

void ComponentDispatcher_ThreadIdle(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        //do your idle stuff here
    }

Answer 2

1. For such scenarios, we need a Timer which fires back some event after a timeinterval.

2. And most importantly, we need a callback / eventhandler which gets called everytime any activity of any kind happens in our application, so that we know that our application is running.

Point 1 can be handled using DispatcherTimer.

Point 2 can be handled using public event CanExecuteRoutedEventHandler CanExecute; .

Putting it altogether :

MainWindow.xaml

xmlns:cmd="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Input; assembly=Presentationcore"

    <!-- a do nothing button -->
    <Button  Command="{x:Static cmd:NavigationCommands.BrowseBack}" Visibility="Collapsed">
        <Button.CommandBindings>
    <!-- we can use any pre-defined / user-defined command -->
            <CommandBinding Command="{x:Static cmd:NavigationCommands.BrowseBack}" CanExecute="CommandBinding_CanExecute_1"/>
        </Button.CommandBindings>
    </Button>

MainWindow.xaml.cs

    public partial class MainWindow: Window
    {
        DispatcherTimer timer = new DispatcherTimer(DispatcherPriority.ApplicationIdle);
        bool running = true;

        public MainWindow()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            timer.Interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5);
            timer.Tick += timer_Tick;
            timer.Start();
        }

        private void CommandBinding_CanExecute_1(object sender, CanExecuteRoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            running = true;
            e.CanExecute = true;
        }

        void timer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            if (!running)
                App.Current.Shutdown();

            running = false;
        }
    }

We can easily extend this approach to fit our needs.

Answer 3

See this answer: Application.Idle event not firing in WPF application

ComponentDispatcher.ThreadIdle is the event you are looking for.