Question

I’m writing a command-line application in .Net. The app itself is fairly simple, but it has to connect synchronously to a web-service, which in turn has to connect to a Oracle database, and those pieces are fond of taking their time.

Is there a straightforward way (without dividing my app exe in two) to continue executing but nonetheless yield execution to the command prompt?

It’s Windows, so no “&”. Also, I cannot use cmd.exe’s “start” cmdlet.

Answer 1

I don’t believe it’s possible without running a background process from your application. However, a fairly clean way to do so might be to modify your Main method like so:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    if (args.Length > 0 && args[0] == "run")
    {
        //actually run your application here
    }
    else
    {
        //create another instance of this process
        ProcessStartInfo info = new ProcessStartInfo();
        info.FileName = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location;
        info.Arguments = "run";
        info.UseShellExecute = false;
        info.CreateNoWindow = true;

        Process.Start(info);
    }
}

Something like that anyway, just writing this off the top of my head. Basically, it creates a new instance of the same executable, but the new process sees the “run” command line argument and does the work rather than spawning a new instance. Setting the options I have “should” allow the spawned process to print to the existing Console as well.