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Thursday, October 29, 2009

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Tip of the day: Opening a process and (optionally) waiting

Every once in a while, you need to open another application from your WinForm application. Today’s snippet is a wrapper which will give you the ability to start a new process (application). It takes two parameters:
filename – string - the name full path of the application to open
waitToFinish – bool - True/False – setting to true will cause your program to stop until the opened application finishes processing.

        private static void OpenApplication(string fileName, bool waitToFinish)
        {
            OpenApplication(fileName, String.Empty, waitToFinish);
        }
 
        private static void OpenApplication(string fileName, string arguments, bool waitToFinish)
        {
            using (System.Diagnostics.Process prc = new System.Diagnostics.Process())
            {
 
                prc.StartInfo.FileName = fileName;
 
                if (arguments.Trim().Length > 0)
                    prc.StartInfo.Arguments = arguments;
 
                prc.Start();
                if (waitToFinish)
                {
                    prc.WaitForExit();
                    prc.Close();
                }
 
            }
        }

To use them, here’s an example usage:

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            OpenApplication(@"c:\windows\notepad.exe", false);
            MessageBox.Show("Alert that processing has continued!", "Processing..", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Information);
        }