How to refresh the windows desktop programmatically (i.e. F5) from C#?

Question

Yeah, I know this seems like a dumb question, its just a one-off hack I need to wrap up a somewhat mundane task so I can move on to something more interesting.

EDIT: Maybe more info would help: I'm trying to remove some shortcuts from the desktop and I need the user to see it removed right away (so they don't have to press F5).

Answer 1

You can use the SHChangeNotify API.

[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("Shell32.dll")]
private static extern int SHChangeNotify(int eventId, int flags, IntPtr item1, IntPtr item2);

and then call it this way

SHChangeNotify(0x8000000, 0x1000, IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero);

Answer 2

I think you're looking for IActiveDesktop::ApplyChanges. You will need to access this via the COM interface, which should be fairly easy with all the documentation Microsoft provides on COM Interop.