How to restart my application if Windows Update forces a reboot?

Question

At the office, when I leave for the night I very rarely log off or reboot. I simply lock my workstation and go home, leaving all my development tools exactly how I left them.

If Windows-Update rolls through and reboots my machine in the middle of the night I'm only slightly peeved because when I log back in the next morning, any MS Office application, or Visual Studio instance I had running will have already automatically restarted, opening whatever file(s)/projects/solutions I may have been working on.

My question is: How can I make my Windows Forms applications (C#) do this? Is there some way for my application to "register" that it wants to be restarted if the system automatically reboots?

Answer 1

I think the RegisterApplicationRestart Win32 API function might be what you're after, it's part of the Restart Manager API.

Answer 2

If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can use the Managed Restart and Recovery API. The links on that page also point to some useful blog entries

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/DanielMoth/Windows-Vista-Restart-amp-Recovery-APIs-from-managed-code/

Answer 3

There's a reallly easy way to do it create a folder called 'start' (or was that StratUp' I always forget) under your menu folder (if you're pre vista the start menu folder is located in documents\settings\user name. Drop a short cut to the application you wish to start and your good to go. Not pretty but it works and can be done from an installer as well real easy

Answer 4

Step 1: Figure out a way to differentiate a windows-triggered restart from a standard one. One solution would be to try preprocessing messages. They're probably different for a windows-triggered restart...or at least they are in Vista in some cases :/

Step 2: If you detect it's a windows-triggered restart, add a scheduled, one-time task.

Answer 5

A simple way is to add an entry to the following registry key :

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce

Just create a value containing the path of your app (optionally including command line arguments). The app will be run at the next startup, then the value will be deleted.