Querying Existing Processes

You can easily get information on running processes through some methods from the Process class that provide the ability of getting process instances. For example, GetProcesses returns an array of Process objects, each one representing a running process whereas GetProcessById and GetProcessByName return information on the specified process given the identification number or name, whereas GetCurrentProcess returns an instance of the Process class representing the current process. Then the Process class exposes lots of useful properties for retrieving information, each of them self-explanatory such as ProcessName, Id, ExitCode, Handle, or HasExited but also other advanced information properties, such as PageMemorySize or VirtualMemorySize, which respectively return the memory size associated with the process on the page memory or the virtual memory. The Visual Studio’s Object Browser and IntelliSense can help you with the rest of available properties. At the moment focus on how you can get information on running processes. The coolest way for getting process information is using LINQ to Objects. The following query, and subsequent For..Each loop, demonstrates how to retrieve a list of names of running processes:

Notice that the query result is converted into IEnumerable(Of String) so that you can eventually bind the list to a user interface control supporting the type.