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Asked: 2026-05-24T23:41:03+00:00

I have an idea for a C# program that works basically like the Windows

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I have an idea for a C# program that works basically like the Windows Explorer. The aim is to display all files and folders, and to show specific information for each of them. One of the features I’m planning is to detect folder sizes which is something the Explorer cannot.

My idea for the algorithm is to cumulate the sizes of all files in the specific folder. However, I’m afraid of performance issues. For example, for displaying the sizes of all folders of C: I have to consider all the files on the whole drive. This will probably take a while and thus the calculation can’t be done each time the user switches to a different folder or back.

So I’d like to cache some of the sizes. However, when files change, are added or removed, the cache data becomes outdated. But I do not want to monitor all file changes while the program is not running.

Is there any way I can find out if the cache is up-to-date, e.g. by retrieving some sort of checksum that doesn’t require calculating all sizes again? Is there another memory and CPU-efficient way to find out if file sizes have changed since the last calculation? Or is there even another possibility?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Windows Explorer has the Folder size available (# files, size on disk etc) availble for the properties of any disk/folder. Directory Properties Example

    As for writing a program, you can certainly use a recurisve DirectoryInfo.EnumerateFiles() to get all the files within a disk/folder.

    As for monitoring, you can use the FileSystemWatcher class to monitor changes to any disk/folder.

    To keep the cache up to date is going to be difficult because:

    1. Depending on the Partition Formated Type [Fat, Fat32, NTFS, etc] you are limited to what each support.
    2. Any new file (created date > cache date) means you still have to enumerate all the files to filter the list to new files.
    3. Modified files (modified date > cache date) has the same issue.

    Unless you use something VERY specific to the Formatted Type beyond what C# provides, updating a cache after the application launch will need to occur every time, and be very intense.

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