How Can I Make My .NET Application Wait for an External Process to Finish?

Ensuring External Process Completion in .NET Applications

When launching external applications within your .NET program using Process.Start(), it's often crucial to wait for the launched process to finish before proceeding. This is particularly important when managing multiple concurrent application instances.

Implementation using WaitForExit()

The .NET framework offers a straightforward solution: the WaitForExit() method. This method elegantly pauses your program's execution until the external process terminates. Here's how to integrate it:

var process = Process.Start(...);
process.WaitForExit();

This code snippet starts a process and then waits for its completion before continuing execution.

Adding a Timeout

For situations where indefinite waiting is undesirable, the overloaded WaitForExit() method allows you to specify a timeout. If the process doesn't finish within the allotted time, an exception is raised. This is illustrated below:

process.WaitForExit(timeoutMilliseconds);

This version ensures that the wait doesn't exceed timeoutMilliseconds.

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