Maximum PC

No worries, I wanted an interesting / small problem to work on this week... I am going to forget everything I am doing at work anyway... and I can see this having some benefit for others too (gamers especially, add a list of processes to stop when your favorite game launches? shit yeah!)

Honestly it wasn't TOO hard. The biggest problem is I don't have anything to really test with. I suppose I could come up with a couple dumb test cases (using notepad and calc or something).

I really need to get it configurable via dat files or something and do some basic stats to find out how long it takes to run, because the interval can be tweaked as needed after that.

The download for VS kept freezing last night, not sure why.

Trying again today and will see if it works.

Sorry for the delay.

No worries. If I get some time I will try it with a couple processes (notepad and calc probably).

On the plus side, the install / uninstall process works

All right, Visual C# Express 2008 does not work (says it's not compatible with the project).

Going to try Visual Studio 2008 Professional (larger download).

Weird....

Actually, that might make sense. I don't know for a fact but something tells me express can't handle service projects.

So I verified that it works... sort of.

What I need to know is what account do these process run under. Do they run under the user account? Right now the way I have it written (and your copy of the code may need changed) is it will start the process under the account the service is running....

So the service starts calc.exe, but I as the user can't see it because I have it running under a system account. Make sense?

I assume that they run at the user level?

Yeah, it runs at the user level.

But my user account is always hackman2007. I'll give it a try after I get VS 2008 Professional installed (3.3GB so may be a little bit).

Username shouldn't matter. If this service gets installed for all users it should work as long as those processes are both running under the same account.

I finally got Visual Studio 2008 Professional loaded on my machine.

I can't figure out how to run this though. I was successfully able to build the project, but can't figure out how to get it to run.

All I can say is, wow VS is complex.

Okay, so there are two projects in there. The Windows Service and the installer. You can right click on the installer and click install and it will run. The only problem is the service is going to run under the wrong account.

So it should work for those processes but I need to tweak it a little bit. Feel free to play with it to see what I did, but understand it was kinda threw together.

Once I get it tweaked and updated to support some config files it should be good to go and I could just give you an installer to run and your service will be running and good to go.

Let me know if you have any questions about the project or code.

Once you get at home with it, it is REALLY powerful.

I don't get any options to install when I right click on the installer.

In VS right click on the installer project?

You should get an install and uninstall option in the menu.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9JzvvMU7X2E/S ... Setup1.jpg

Tried that, no dice.

There is no install or uninstall option when I right click it.

Edit: When I right click on WatcherSetup I do get an Install/Uninstall option.

Werd, that is what you want. It will install it as a service.

Service started successfully.

Will play around with it some tomorrow.

Only trouble is, being that I have never worked with developing windows services before, the only way I know is to uninstall it and make your changes, then reinstall.

There is another way to install it that doesn't require continuously reinstalling it.

1. Open a VS command prompt to the bin/Debug directory of the service
2. installutil <ServiceName>

To uninstall, just use installutil /u <ServiceName>

Rebuilding the solution in VS does require that the service is stopped, but then you don't have to reinstall the service every time.

Okay, played around with it a bit.

Seems to work great.

Thanks again.