ShellExecute equivalent in .NET

c# .net winapi windows-shell shellexecute
Martin Kenny picture Martin Kenny · Nov 3, 2008 · Viewed 76.8k times · Source

I'm looking for the .NET-preferred way of performing the same type of thing that ShellExecute does in Win32 (opening, printing, etc. for arbitrary file types).

I've been programming Windows for over 20 years, but I'm a complete newbie at .NET, so maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places. I'm currently using .NET 2.0 (VS C# 2005), but could use VS 2008 if need be.

If the only answer is to use P/Invoke, then I might be better just writing my small utility using Win32 anyway.

Answer

Marc Gravell picture Marc Gravell · Nov 3, 2008

Process.Start.

Note that advanced uses (printing etc) require using a ProcessStartInfo and setting the Verb property.

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