Question

I want to make a program that monitors the other programs running on Windows. It needs to know for instance “Max Payne 2 opened at 4:36pm” or “Firefox closed at 9:52 am.” Ideally, it would be able to tell the difference between when I’m actually using the program, or if I have alt-tabbed out of it or if I’m inactive. How do I extract that data? Could someone please just point me in the right direction so I know what phrase I need to google or what topic I need to pick up a book on?

Answer 1

You can do this in order to list the running processes:

  using System.Diagnostics;

 .......


  Process[] processlist = Process.GetProcesses();

     foreach(Process theprocess in processlist){
     Console.WriteLine(”Process: {0} ID: {1}”, theprocess.ProcessName, theprocess.Id);
  }

Furthermore, you may use the following properties to retrieve some interesting info:

 theprocess.StartTime (Shows the time the process started)
 theprocess.TotalProcessorTime (Shows the amount of CPU time the process has taken)
 theprocess.Threads ( gives access to the collection of threads in the process)