Question

I need to pass a list of strings as parameter to a console application (developed with C#).
The console application is started with System.Diagnostics.Process.Start like:

string fname = "testDoc";
List<string> myList;  //initialized elsewhere

Process console = Process.Start("Client.exe", "-filename:"+fname+ " -list:"+myList);

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Running

Process console = Process.Start("Client.exe", "-filename:" + fname + " -list:" + myList)

will execute myList.ToString() and will translate to:

Client.exe -filename:testDoc -list:System.Collections.Generic.List`1[System.String]

which is not what you want to achieve. Try

Process console = Process.Start("Client.exe", "-filename:" + fname + " -list:" + String.Join(",", myList)) 

or something similar.

UPDATE

Of course, you might want to consider some more civilized methods of passing data to that process. Common ways include:

• database
• file system (files)
• WCF

UPDATE

Given the context supplied in the comment, I’d opt for a completely separate windows service running on the server (non-stop, not invoked) with database used for synchronization:

• database with table Tasks with columns input data, output data and any other you might want (like some dates or user IDs)
• webpage inserting rows into that table as data-to-be-processed appears
• windows service repeatedly (every x seconds) querying the table for unprocessed tasks and performing the tasks if there’s any; results get saved in the output data column
• on user request webpage queries for a given task and displays it’s status, showing the output data if it’s there

This is much more robust and scales much better with growing user traffic. The service itself would ideally spawn worker threads for separate tasks to take advantage of multiple cores. With such architecture in place, there’s lots of ways to optimize performance and monitor the tasks.