process - Detect when exe is started vb.net

Question

Dose anybody know how I can make my VB.net application wait until a process is detected as running?

I can find example of how to detect once an exe has finished running but none that detect when an exe is started?

Answer 1

You can use the System.Management.ManagementEventWatcher to wait for certain WMI events to occur. You need to give it a query type and condition to have it watch for the next creation of your process, then get it to do something when that occurs.

For example, if you want :

Dim watcher As ManagementEventWatcher

Public Sub Main()
    Dim monitoredProcess = "Notepad.exe"
    Dim query As WqlEventQuery = New WqlEventQuery("__InstanceCreationEvent", new TimeSpan(0, 0, 1), "TargetInstance isa ""Win32_Process"" And TargetInstance.Name = """ & monitoredProcess & """")

    watcher = New ManagementEventWatcher()
    watcher.Query = query

    'This starts watching asynchronously, triggering EventArrived events every time a new event comes in.
    'You can do synchronous watching via the WaitForNextEvent() method
    watcher.Start()

End Sub

Private Sub Watcher_EventArrived(sender As Object, e As EventArrivedEventArgs) Handles watcher.EventArrived
    'Do stuff with the startup event
End Sub  

Eventually you'll need to stop the watcher, which is you can do by closing the app, or calling watcher.Stop(). This has been written as brain compiler, so if there's any issues let me know.