c# WPF Maintain Single Instance of loader

Question

I have a loader.exe with Main() that loads the 'UI' in WPF, the thing is that I want only one instance of the loader.exe, how can I achieve it?

Is there a way a user clicks loader.exe it should check if an existing loader.exe is running and does nothing.

currently I have

loader.exe

with

main() 
....
..
Load UI
...

the loader has no idea what its loading etc so I can't do many things with the loader project...

Any help n code is highly appreciated

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Have a look at:

http://yogesh.jagotagroup.com/blog/post/2008/07/03/Ways-of-making-a-WPF-application-Single-Instance.aspx

Also, you might find a more detailed answer in the following post here on StackOverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19147/what-is-the-correct-way-to-create-a-single-instance-application

Answer 2

We use the following C# code to detect if an application is already running:

using System.Threading;

string appSpecificGuid = "{007400FE-003D-00A5-AFFE-DA62E35CC1F5}";    
bool exclusive;
Mutex m = new Mutex(true, appSpecificGuid, out exclusive);
if (exclusive) {
    // run
} else {
    // already running
}

Regards, tamberg

Answer 3

This is my simple and useful solution: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/maxim/archive/2010/02/13/single-instance-application-manager.aspx