Need to get back form controls' information externally

Are there any tutorials or guides out there that anyone knows of that will show me how to read forms from an external program and get back information about the controls on the form? Currently, I can get the handle to the form, and I can get the class name, but I need to get more information such as a persistent name and contained data. Thanks.

Edit:

I now have a way to read the contained data (with the WM_GETTEXT message), however, I still need a persistent name/ID that I can be sure will not change from instance to instance. One way I can think of for doing this is to take the handle, find the position of the control on the 开发者_StackOverflow社区window, and then get the handle from the position from then on. Another way is to determine a static ID for the control and then use that to get the handle from then on. The new scope of my problem is how to implement either of these. Any Ideas?

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I would look at UI Automation; in particular, the RuntimeID property, the NativeWindowHandle property, and the Name property.