What is the correct way to create a single-instanc

Question

Using C# and WPF under .NET (rather than Windows Forms or console), what is the correct way to create an application that can only be run as a single instance?

I know it has something to do with some mythical thing called a mutex, rarely can I find someone that bothers to stop and explain what one of these are.

The code needs to also inform the already-running instance that the user tried to start a second one, and maybe also pass any command-line arguments if any existed.

Answer 1

So many answers to such a seemingly simple question. Just to shake things up a little bit here is my solution to this problem.

Creating a Mutex can be troublesome because the JIT-er only sees you using it for a small portion of your code and wants to mark it as ready for garbage collection. It pretty much wants to out-smart you thinking you are not going to be using that Mutex for that long. In reality you want to hang onto this Mutex for as long as your application is running. The best way to tell the garbage collector to leave you Mutex alone is to tell it to keep it alive though out the different generations of garage collection. Example:

var m = new Mutex(...);
...
GC.KeepAlive(m);

I lifted the idea from this page: http://www.ai.uga.edu/~mc/SingleInstance.html

Answer 2

Usually whenever we execute an .exe, every time it creates a separate windows process with its own address space, resources and so on. But we do not want this criteria as this would prevent us from creating single process. Single instance applications can be created using the Mutex in C# which is discussed in this article

Moreover if we want to bring the application on top we can do it using

 [DllImport("user32")]
 static extern IntPtr SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr hWnd);

Answer 3

I found the simpler solution, similar to Dale Ragan's, but slightly modified. It does practically everything you need and based on the standard Microsoft WindowsFormsApplicationBase class.

Firstly, you create SingleInstanceController class, which you can use in all other single-instance applications, which use Windows Forms:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Microsoft.VisualBasic.ApplicationServices;


namespace SingleInstanceController_NET
{
    public class SingleInstanceController
    : WindowsFormsApplicationBase
    {
        public delegate Form CreateMainForm();
        public delegate void StartNextInstanceDelegate(Form mainWindow);
        CreateMainForm formCreation;
        StartNextInstanceDelegate onStartNextInstance;
        public SingleInstanceController(CreateMainForm formCreation, StartNextInstanceDelegate onStartNextInstance)
        {
            // Set whether the application is single instance
            this.formCreation = formCreation;
            this.onStartNextInstance = onStartNextInstance;
            this.IsSingleInstance = true;

            this.StartupNextInstance += new StartupNextInstanceEventHandler(this_StartupNextInstance);                      
        }

        void this_StartupNextInstance(object sender, StartupNextInstanceEventArgs e)
        {
            if (onStartNextInstance != null)
            {
                onStartNextInstance(this.MainForm); // This code will be executed when the user tries to start the running program again,
                                                    // for example, by clicking on the exe file.
            }                                       // This code can determine how to re-activate the existing main window of the running application.
        }

        protected override void OnCreateMainForm()
        {
            // Instantiate your main application form
            this.MainForm = formCreation();
        }

        public void Run()
        {
            string[] commandLine = new string[0];
            base.Run(commandLine);
        }
    }
}

Then you can use it in your program as follows:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using SingleInstanceController_NET;

namespace SingleInstance
{
    static class Program
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The main entry point for the application.
        /// </summary>
        static Form CreateForm()
        {
            return new Form1(); // Form1 is used for the main window.
        }

        static void OnStartNextInstance(Form mainWindow) // When the user tries to restart the application again,
                                                         // the main window is activated again.
        {
            mainWindow.WindowState = FormWindowState.Maximized;
        }
        [STAThread]
        static void Main()
        {
            Application.EnableVisualStyles();
            Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);            
            SingleInstanceController controller = new SingleInstanceController(CreateForm, OnStartNextInstance);
            controller.Run();         
        }
    }
}

Both the program and the SingleInstanceController_NET solution should reference Microsoft.VisualBasic . If you just want to reactivate the running application as a normal window when the user tries to restart the running program, the second parameter in the SingleInstanceController can be null. In the given example, the window is maximized.

Answer 4

Look at the folllowing code. It is a great and simple solution to prevent multiple instances of a WPF application.

private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
{
    Process thisProc = Process.GetCurrentProcess();
    if (Process.GetProcessesByName(thisProc.ProcessName).Length > 1)
    {
        MessageBox.Show("Application running");
        Application.Current.Shutdown();
        return;
    }

    var wLogin = new LoginWindow();

    if (wLogin.ShowDialog() == true)
    {
        var wMain = new Main();
        wMain.WindowState = WindowState.Maximized;
        wMain.Show();
    }
    else
    {
        Application.Current.Shutdown();
    }
}

Answer 5

Here's the same thing implemented via Event.

public enum ApplicationSingleInstanceMode
{
    CurrentUserSession,
    AllSessionsOfCurrentUser,
    Pc
}

public class ApplicationSingleInstancePerUser: IDisposable
{
    private readonly EventWaitHandle _event;

    /// <summary>
    /// Shows if the current instance of ghost is the first
    /// </summary>
    public bool FirstInstance { get; private set; }

    /// <summary>
    /// Initializes 
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="applicationName">The application name</param>
    /// <param name="mode">The single mode</param>
    public ApplicationSingleInstancePerUser(string applicationName, ApplicationSingleInstanceMode mode = ApplicationSingleInstanceMode.CurrentUserSession)
    {
        string name;
        if (mode == ApplicationSingleInstanceMode.CurrentUserSession)
            name = $"Local\\{applicationName}";
        else if (mode == ApplicationSingleInstanceMode.AllSessionsOfCurrentUser)
            name = $"Global\\{applicationName}{Environment.UserDomainName}";
        else
            name = $"Global\\{applicationName}";

        try
        {
            bool created;
            _event = new EventWaitHandle(false, EventResetMode.ManualReset, name, out created);
            FirstInstance = created;
        }
        catch
        {
        }
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        _event.Dispose();
    }
}

Answer 6

The code C# .NET Single Instance Application that is the reference for the marked answer is a great start.

However, I found it doesn't handle very well the cases when the instance that already exist has a modal dialog open, whether that dialog is a managed one (like another Form such as an about box), or an unmanaged one (like the OpenFileDialog even when using the standard .NET class). With the original code, the main form is activated, but the modal one stays unactive, which looks strange, plus the user must click on it to keep using the app.

So, I have create a SingleInstance utility class to handle all this quite automatically for Winforms and WPF applications.

Winforms:

1) modify the Program class like this:

static class Program
{
    public static readonly SingleInstance Singleton = new SingleInstance(typeof(Program).FullName);

    [STAThread]
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // NOTE: if this always return false, close & restart Visual Studio
        // this is probably due to the vshost.exe thing
        Singleton.RunFirstInstance(() =>
        {
            SingleInstanceMain(args);
        });
    }

    public static void SingleInstanceMain(string[] args)
    {
        // standard code that was in Main now goes here
        Application.EnableVisualStyles();
        Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
        Application.Run(new Form1());
    }
}

2) modify the main window class like this:

public partial class Form1 : Form
{
    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    protected override void WndProc(ref Message m)
    {
        // if needed, the singleton will restore this window
        Program.Singleton.OnWndProc(this, m, true);

        // TODO: handle specific messages here if needed
        base.WndProc(ref m);
    }
}

WPF:

1) modify the App page like this (and make sure you set its build action to page to be able to redefine the Main method):

public partial class App : Application
{
    public static readonly SingleInstance Singleton = new SingleInstance(typeof(App).FullName);

    [STAThread]
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // NOTE: if this always return false, close & restart Visual Studio
        // this is probably due to the vshost.exe thing
        Singleton.RunFirstInstance(() =>
        {
            SingleInstanceMain(args);
        });
    }

    public static void SingleInstanceMain(string[] args)
    {
        // standard code that was in Main now goes here
        App app = new App();
        app.InitializeComponent();
        app.Run();
    }
}

2) modify the main window class like this:

public partial class MainWindow : Window
{
    private HwndSource _source;

    public MainWindow()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    protected override void OnSourceInitialized(EventArgs e)
    {
        base.OnSourceInitialized(e);
        _source = (HwndSource)PresentationSource.FromVisual(this);
        _source.AddHook(HwndSourceHook);
    }

    protected virtual IntPtr HwndSourceHook(IntPtr hwnd, int msg, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam, ref bool handled)
    {
        // if needed, the singleton will restore this window
        App.Singleton.OnWndProc(hwnd, msg, wParam, lParam, true, true);

        // TODO: handle other specific message
        return IntPtr.Zero;
    }

And here is the utility class:

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Threading;

namespace SingleInstanceUtilities
{
    public sealed class SingleInstance
    {
        private const int HWND_BROADCAST = 0xFFFF;

        [DllImport("user32.dll")]
        private static extern bool PostMessage(IntPtr hwnd, int msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam);

        [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
        private static extern int RegisterWindowMessage(string message);

        [DllImport("user32.dll")]
        private static extern bool SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr hWnd);

        public SingleInstance(string uniqueName)
        {
            if (uniqueName == null)
                throw new ArgumentNullException("uniqueName");

            Mutex = new Mutex(true, uniqueName);
            Message = RegisterWindowMessage("WM_" + uniqueName);
        }

        public Mutex Mutex { get; private set; }
        public int Message { get; private set; }

        public void RunFirstInstance(Action action)
        {
            RunFirstInstance(action, IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero);
        }

        // NOTE: if this always return false, close & restart Visual Studio
        // this is probably due to the vshost.exe thing
        public void RunFirstInstance(Action action, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam)
        {
            if (action == null)
                throw new ArgumentNullException("action");

            if (WaitForMutext(wParam, lParam))
            {
                try
                {
                    action();
                }
                finally
                {
                    ReleaseMutex();
                }
            }
        }

        public static void ActivateWindow(IntPtr hwnd)
        {
            if (hwnd == IntPtr.Zero)
                return;

            FormUtilities.ActivateWindow(FormUtilities.GetModalWindow(hwnd));
        }

        public void OnWndProc(IntPtr hwnd, int m, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam, bool restorePlacement, bool activate)
        {
            if (m == Message)
            {
                if (restorePlacement)
                {
                    WindowPlacement placement = WindowPlacement.GetPlacement(hwnd, false);
                    if (placement.IsValid && placement.IsMinimized)
                    {
                        const int SW_SHOWNORMAL = 1;
                        placement.ShowCmd = SW_SHOWNORMAL;
                        placement.SetPlacement(hwnd);
                    }
                }

                if (activate)
                {
                    SetForegroundWindow(hwnd);
                    FormUtilities.ActivateWindow(FormUtilities.GetModalWindow(hwnd));
                }
            }
        }

#if WINFORMS // define this for Winforms apps
        public void OnWndProc(System.Windows.Forms.Form form, int m, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam, bool activate)
        {
            if (form == null)
                throw new ArgumentNullException("form");

            if (m == Message)
            {
                if (activate)
                {
                    if (form.WindowState == System.Windows.Forms.FormWindowState.Minimized)
                    {
                        form.WindowState = System.Windows.Forms.FormWindowState.Normal;
                    }

                    form.Activate();
                    FormUtilities.ActivateWindow(FormUtilities.GetModalWindow(form.Handle));
                }
            }
        }

        public void OnWndProc(System.Windows.Forms.Form form, System.Windows.Forms.Message m, bool activate)
        {
            if (form == null)
                throw new ArgumentNullException("form");

            OnWndProc(form, m.Msg, m.WParam, m.LParam, activate);
        }
#endif

        public void ReleaseMutex()
        {
            Mutex.ReleaseMutex();
        }

        public bool WaitForMutext(bool force, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam)
        {
            bool b = PrivateWaitForMutext(force);
            if (!b)
            {
                PostMessage((IntPtr)HWND_BROADCAST, Message, wParam, lParam);
            }
            return b;
        }

        public bool WaitForMutext(IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam)
        {
            return WaitForMutext(false, wParam, lParam);
        }

        private bool PrivateWaitForMutext(bool force)
        {
            if (force)
                return true;

            try
            {
                return Mutex.WaitOne(TimeSpan.Zero, true);
            }
            catch (AbandonedMutexException)
            {
                return true;
            }
        }
    }

    // NOTE: don't add any field or public get/set property, as this must exactly map to Windows' WINDOWPLACEMENT structure
    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    public struct WindowPlacement
    {
        public int Length { get; set; }
        public int Flags { get; set; }
        public int ShowCmd { get; set; }
        public int MinPositionX { get; set; }
        public int MinPositionY { get; set; }
        public int MaxPositionX { get; set; }
        public int MaxPositionY { get; set; }
        public int NormalPositionLeft { get; set; }
        public int NormalPositionTop { get; set; }
        public int NormalPositionRight { get; set; }
        public int NormalPositionBottom { get; set; }

        [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
        private static extern bool SetWindowPlacement(IntPtr hWnd, ref WindowPlacement lpwndpl);

        [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
        private static extern bool GetWindowPlacement(IntPtr hWnd, ref WindowPlacement lpwndpl);

        private const int SW_SHOWMINIMIZED = 2;

        public bool IsMinimized
        {
            get
            {
                return ShowCmd == SW_SHOWMINIMIZED;
            }
        }

        public bool IsValid
        {
            get
            {
                return Length == Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(WindowPlacement));
            }
        }

        public void SetPlacement(IntPtr windowHandle)
        {
            SetWindowPlacement(windowHandle, ref this);
        }

        public static WindowPlacement GetPlacement(IntPtr windowHandle, bool throwOnError)
        {
            WindowPlacement placement = new WindowPlacement();
            if (windowHandle == IntPtr.Zero)
                return placement;

            placement.Length = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(WindowPlacement));
            if (!GetWindowPlacement(windowHandle, ref placement))
            {
                if (throwOnError)
                    throw new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error());

                return new WindowPlacement();
            }
            return placement;
        }
    }

    public static class FormUtilities
    {
        [DllImport("user32.dll")]
        private static extern IntPtr GetWindow(IntPtr hWnd, int uCmd);

        [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
        private static extern IntPtr SetActiveWindow(IntPtr hWnd);

        [DllImport("user32.dll")]
        private static extern bool IsWindowVisible(IntPtr hWnd);

        [DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
        public static extern int GetCurrentThreadId();

        private delegate bool EnumChildrenCallback(IntPtr hwnd, IntPtr lParam);

        [DllImport("user32.dll")]
        private static extern bool EnumThreadWindows(int dwThreadId, EnumChildrenCallback lpEnumFunc, IntPtr lParam);

        private class ModalWindowUtil
        {
            private const int GW_OWNER = 4;
            private int _maxOwnershipLevel;
            private IntPtr _maxOwnershipHandle;

            private bool EnumChildren(IntPtr hwnd, IntPtr lParam)
            {
                int level = 1;
                if (IsWindowVisible(hwnd) && IsOwned(lParam, hwnd, ref level))
                {
                    if (level > _maxOwnershipLevel)
                    {
                        _maxOwnershipHandle = hwnd;
                        _maxOwnershipLevel = level;
                    }
                }
                return true;
            }

            private static bool IsOwned(IntPtr owner, IntPtr hwnd, ref int level)
            {
                IntPtr o = GetWindow(hwnd, GW_OWNER);
                if (o == IntPtr.Zero)
                    return false;

                if (o == owner)
                    return true;

                level++;
                return IsOwned(owner, o, ref level);
            }

            public static void ActivateWindow(IntPtr hwnd)
            {
                if (hwnd != IntPtr.Zero)
                {
                    SetActiveWindow(hwnd);
                }
            }

            public static IntPtr GetModalWindow(IntPtr owner)
            {
                ModalWindowUtil util = new ModalWindowUtil();
                EnumThreadWindows(GetCurrentThreadId(), util.EnumChildren, owner);
                return util._maxOwnershipHandle; // may be IntPtr.Zero
            }
        }

        public static void ActivateWindow(IntPtr hwnd)
        {
            ModalWindowUtil.ActivateWindow(hwnd);
        }

        public static IntPtr GetModalWindow(IntPtr owner)
        {
            return ModalWindowUtil.GetModalWindow(owner);
        }
    }
}