Killing IIS Express

A brief aside: I’ve got to the point where I’m about to fire up IIS Express from Visual Studio. In order to be a good citizen, our extension should probably shut it down again later.

So, let’s fire up JetBrains dotPeek and see how the IIS Express tray application does it.

The obvious place to start looking is in IisExpressWorkerProcess.Stop. This calls IisExpressHelper.SendStopMessageToProcess, passing a process ID.

This searches using GetTopWindow and GetWindow(GW_NEXT) for top-level windows belonging to the correct process. It then posts a WM_QUIT message to it. I’ll add some code for that later.

Why not use Process.CloseMainWindow?

Process.CloseMainWindow() posts a WM_CLOSE message, rather than WM_QUIT. But, mainly, it doesn’t work with IIS Express, because MainWindowHandle is zero.