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Hi,



We want to write a program (Prog_A) to check the activities of another

program (Prog_B). If there is no activity on the Prog_B for a period of time,

the Prog_A need send a message to close the Prog_B.



Is it possible to write a program to check the activities of another program

in C# ?



Thank you in advance!



David


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david <david@discussions.microsoft.com>wrote:

What do you mean by "activity"?

--

With best wishes,

Igor Tandetnik



With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not

necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to

land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly

overhead. -- RFC 1925





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You need to be more specific about what you're doing. Does "Prog_B" belong

to you for instance (so you can modify it as required) or is it some random

program you want to shut down if there's no activity. If so then no, it's

usually not possible to do it reliably or safely.





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Thanks Igor and Larry.



The activity means the usage of the program, and Prog_B doesnâ??t belong to us.



We have a limit of licenses for this program (Prog_B). Some user might open

this program, but doesnâ??t really use it. In this case, it will be nice if we

can close it on his/her machine, and then another user can use it.



From what Larry said, it is not possible to do it. We will try to find other

solutions.



Thanks again,



David







"david" wrote:

While you can monitor its CPU usage if you really want, and attempt to shut

it down if there's little activity, there's really no practical way to know

when activity has dropped completely to zero (or if it will pick up again

the moment you try to close it). More importantly perhaps, you can't cleanly

shut it down anyway since you don't know what it's doing at the time.

Perhaps it's in the middle of saving something to disk for instance so if

you terminate it then you do so at your own risk (potentially corrupting

something). If you know for sure that it's safe to do this however depending

on the nature of the app, and it will continue to be safe when future

versions are released (big assumption), then see here for details.



support.microsoft.com/kb/178893">support.microsoft.com/kb/178893





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"Larry Smith" wrote:





Thank you for the good idea about monitoring CPU usage. It might be a

practical way in my case. I will try it out.



Thanks,



David



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"Larry Smith" <no_spam@_nospam.com>wrote in message

If you post it WM_CLOSE instead of terminating the process, you are a lot

less likely to cause data loss.





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On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:08:03 -0700, david

<david@discussions.microsoft.com>wrote:



depending on the program maybe you could send it messages and examine

the reactions of the program, thay way you can get a hint if it is

still reacting. of course this only works if it is a gui program with

a message q.



hth/ajk

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