Need to disable the screen saver / screen locking in Windows C#/.Net [closed]

Question

For a particular application, I need the screen saver to be disabled while it's running. The operator COULD manually turn it off, and then back on later, but the easiest thing to do would be to just keep the screen saver at bay while the application is running.

How do I do this? I've found code for actually turning off the screen saver with SPI_SETSCREENSAVEACTIVE, but I don't think that's what I want.

Answer 1

EDIT - I have an updated answer using the modern Power Availability Request API (supersedes SetThreadExecutionState) here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/63632916/67824

[FlagsAttribute] public enum EXECUTION_STATE : uint {     ES_SYSTEM_REQUIRED = 0x00000001,     ES_DISPLAY_REQUIRED = 0x00000002,     // Legacy flag, should not be used.     // ES_USER_PRESENT   = 0x00000004,     ES_AWAYMODE_REQUIRED = 0x00000040,     ES_CONTINUOUS = 0x80000000, }  public static class SleepUtil {     [DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)]     public static extern EXECUTION_STATE SetThreadExecutionState(EXECUTION_STATE esFlags); }  public void PreventSleep() {     if (SleepUtil.SetThreadExecutionState(EXECUTION_STATE.ES_CONTINUOUS         | EXECUTION_STATE.ES_DISPLAY_REQUIRED           | EXECUTION_STATE.ES_SYSTEM_REQUIRED          | EXECUTION_STATE.ES_AWAYMODE_REQUIRED) == 0) //Away mode for Windows >= Vista         SleepUtil.SetThreadExecutionState(EXECUTION_STATE.ES_CONTINUOUS             | EXECUTION_STATE.ES_DISPLAY_REQUIRED              | EXECUTION_STATE.ES_SYSTEM_REQUIRED); //Windows < Vista, forget away mode } 

Credit: P/Invoke, deadpoint