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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T20:07:10+00:00

I creating an windows service which will from time to time check if a

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I creating an windows service which will from time to time check if a certain exists and if it does, then reads from it, sends data to a server and move a file to another folder. A file’s size is about 1-3 Mb.

I think I will use System.Threading.Timer here to check if a file exists. What do you think of it?

And another question. If a file is being copied then my app must not read from it. It should wait until copying is done. Only after that it must read from it and does other activities.

So the questions:

1) Is that a right decision to use System.Threading.Timer?

2) How do I check a file is being copied and wait until it’s done?

3) Must I use multi-threading?

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  1. Editorial Team

    The usual approach I’ve used is to monitor the folder/s with FileSystemWatcher, (or the relevant API’s if not .NET managed), and try to ensure that the only operations performed on the source/target folders are move/rename between folders on the same physical drive, and delete. If you want to add a file, open/write/flush/close it ito a temp folder on the target filesystem drive and only then move/rename it to the folder being watched. It is vital that the temp folder is on the same physical drive as the target folder so that it can be move/renamed without a data copy.

    This works well on non-managed systems, not tried it on C#, but don’t see any reason for to not to work OK.

    Other solutions involving continual polling and/or checking file sizes are just inconvenient, inflexible, wasteful, messy and latency-ridden at best.

    Multithreading – probably yes on any remote filesystem. Network file calls tend to have very long timeouts on unrechability etc. and so block the caller for what seems like forever before issuing an error/exception. If you want to get anything else done, you should probably thread off the lot unless your users can tolerate ‘hourglass apps’, with windows becoming unresponsive, disappearing to back, getting greyed-out and the OS offering to close them.

    Oh, and another thing – best to go on a purge when starting up. Stuff can go wrong at any time, so clean any lingering rubbish from temp folders etc. when running up.

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