Question

I am creating one desktop application in which I want to track user activity on the system like opened Microsoft Excel with file name and worked for … much of time on that..

I want to create on xml file to maintain that log.

Please provide me help on that.

Answer 1

This feels like one of those questions where you have to figure out what is meant by the question itself. Taken at face value, it sounds like you want to monitor how long a user spends in any process running in their session, however it may be that you only really want to know if, and for how long a user spends time in a specific subset of all running processes.

Since I’m not sure which of these is the correct assumption to make, I will address both as best I can.

Regardless of whether you are monitoring one or all processes, you need to know what processes are running when you start up, and you need to be notified when a new process is created. The first of these requirements can be met using the GetProcesses() method of the System.Diagnostics.Process class, the second is a tad more tricky.

One option for checking whether new processes exist is to call GetProcesses after a specified interval (polling) and determine whether the list of processes has changed. While you can do this, it may be very expensive in terms of system resources, especially if done too frequently.

Another option is to look for some mechanism that allows you to register to be notified of the creation of a new process asynchronously, I don’t believe such a thing exists within the .NET Framework 2.0 but is likely to exist as part of the Win32 API, unfortunately I cant give you a specific function name because I don’t know what it is.

Finally, however you do it, I recommend being as specific as you can about the notifications you choose to subscribe for, the less of them there are, the less resources are used generating and processing them.

Once you know what processes are running and which you are interested in you will need to determine when focus changes to a new process of interest so that you can time how long the user spends actually using the application, for this you can use the GetForegroundWindow function to get the window handle of the currently focused window.

As far as longing to an XML file, you can either use an external library such as long4net as suggested by pranay’s answer, or you can build the log file using the XmlTextWriter or XmlDocument classes in the System.Xml namespace