Yesterday’s post, “.NET 11 Preview - Capturing Process Exit Status”, looked at how to start a process and capture its exit status, which is useful in scenarios where you want to know whether your process ran to completion successfully.

In today’s post, we will look at another scenario - where you want to start a process and forget, typically in a scenario where your application executes a long-running child process.

Currently, we would do it like this:

Process.Start(new ProcessStartInfo
{
    FileName = "ping",
    Arguments = "-v google.com",
    CreateNoWindow = true
});

This is not the best of examples, as the whole point of ping is to read the results, but this is just an illustration.

The problem with this is that, much as it works, the intent is not very clear.

This has been addressed in NET 11 with the introduction of the aptly named StartAndForget method, added to the Process class.

The equivalent code as follows:

Process.StartAndForget("ping", ["-v", "conradakunga.com"]);

Not only is this much simpler, but it is also much clearer in terms of communicating the intent.

TLDR

The StartAndForget method has been introduced to the Process class for cases where you want to start a child process without waiting for it.

The code is in my GitHub.

Happy hacking!