Question

I have this problem in my application:

• Step 1 – create an file (xml) and put some content in it
• Step 2 – a 3rd party application will open the file and get the info from the file made in step 1.
• Step 3 – delete the file again.

The first question that I have is about this part of the code:

XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
DataSet ds = //use a method to put in the data
xmlDoc.LoadXml(ds.GetXml());
xmlDoc.Save("Filename");
// ...
Process.Start(startInfo);

Is my assumption correct that the last line only gets executed when the above is already done?
So I can be 100% sure that the data is all in the xml before it tries to start it right?

The second part where I get an error now is here:

Process.Start(startInfo);
File.Delete("Filename");

What happens now, is that the file already gets deleted before the 3rd party program had read it into its memory.

Is there some way that I can check that the file is no longer in use, or make some stable way of waiting?

I already found a way to use Thread.Sleep(TimeInMiliSec); but I guess this is not a correct way of doing this (more like a workaround solution)?

Answer 1

It looks like you just need to add something like the following:

Process p = new Process();
p.StartInfo = startInfo;
p.WaitForExit();

Process.Start() starts another process but it doesn’t wait for that process to finish before continuing on.