How to get active files location in Visual studio in c# win. form

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1.00/5 (2 votes)

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VS2008

I am creating an application that would keep a track of how much time is spent on every file.

Example:-
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bcocp5stn0pzvwe/Untitled.png?dl=0[^]

above is the image of the problem i am facing. now what i need here is i want the current or active file which is Program.cs file's location.

Till now i googled and was only able to find an answer which did not work for me Answer found after googling.please help by sending a code snippet

Thanks in advance

Posted 6-May-15 6:47am

agent_kruger

Updated 6-May-15 7:06am

v2

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 6-May-15 15:04pm

There is no such concept as "active file". The whole think makes no sense.
Why? why?!
—SA

agent_kruger 6-May-15 15:46pm

sir what i am asking for that if my focus is on program.cs i can get the location of that and if my location is form1 then i should get location of form1. now is it clear?

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 6-May-15 16:42pm

I don't understand why. Do you mean that your file in on top during the working session of VS? But what's the difference what is there and how long it takes to stay there?
—SA

agent_kruger 8-May-15 9:35am

i need to get the file's location where i am currently working on ("Program.cs" as in the image) from the visual studio instance.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 8-May-15 10:15am

And isn't that enough to see this location? VS shows it... You did not explain why.
—SA

agent_kruger 8-May-15 13:56pm

no i want that location through code viz running as service

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 8-May-15 14:05pm

All right, if you don't want to answer, don't...
—SA

agent_kruger 8-May-15 14:23pm

i will explain it to you actually by getting the location i want to copy all the text and then use it for reviewing what all changes were made in the current file.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 8-May-15 14:28pm

Probably you don't understand what "explanation" means. You keep saying "I want". This is not an explanation.
—SA

agent_kruger 8-May-15 14:31pm

what kind of explanation are you expecting sir?

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 8-May-15 14:37pm

It goes nowhere. Well, every time you write "I want" I want to know why you want that. And I can explain why I want to know that. :-)
—SA

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Dave Kreskowiak · Answer 1 · 2015-05-06T11:18:00

Solution 2

There's no such thing as an "active file" in any sense of what you're saying.

If you're talking about if the file in Visual Studio is being actively changed in the code editor, you're really not going to get anything reliably accurate. I can have as many as 15 files open at a time and making changes to all of them. So are you going to say that the 4 seconds I spend in one editor window, then change to another window for 5 seconds, and another for another few seconds, ..., is going to count for something?

That's meaningless.

Posted 6-May-15 11:18am

Dave Kreskowiak

Comments

agent_kruger 7-May-15 11:26am

sir, at the current stage i mean to get all files location that are opened in the current "Visual Studio 2008" or "devenv.exe". For example we take the image in question. there are 2 files opened "Program.cs" and "Form1.cs". i need to get location of the file which is active viz. "Program.cs".

Dave Kreskowiak 7-May-15 11:29am

Are you writing a Visual Studio plugin/extension?

agent_kruger 8-May-15 9:33am

no, i am writing in windows form (i know windows form will be "visible=false" the whole time but need some features of it) and will act as a service as soon as the computer is switched on.

Dave Kreskowiak 8-May-15 9:43am

Well, that makes it extremely difficult to write because there is way to tell which process has a file open in an editor. When Visual Studio has a file open in an editor, it opens the file on disk, reads it and closes it. The file is not held open so there is no way for your code to determine if the file is being worked on.

You have to constantly poll the handle table to see which processes are opening which files. The problem with what you're doing is that you cannot determine why the file was opened. There is no way for you to determine which file "is being worked on".

Again, you're trying to do something that is completely worthless as a data point in process tracking.

agent_kruger 8-May-15 13:57pm

see the link i searched on google and see if you can help me out with that code

Dave Kreskowiak 8-May-15 14:03pm

That code only works if put in a Visual Studio extension.

agent_kruger 8-May-15 14:24pm

can you explain how? because i did not get it? and as far as extension is concerned i am willing to do so if you can help me understand.

Dave Kreskowiak 8-May-15 18:50pm

Explain what? If you're talking about how to create a Visual Studio extension you're not going to get an answer to that in a couple of forum posts. That's a lot on reading on your part, not mine.

agent_kruger 8-May-15 23:32pm

no i can create the extension part myself but when i try the code i googled it would give me an "object reference" error

Dave Kreskowiak 9-May-15 8:29am

You get that because you're trying to use a property or call a method on an object that is null. You're code is written to expect every single method call to succeed and return something and it's not.

This is the easiest of the exceptions to diagnose. Step through the code in the debugger and look at the variable values to see what's happening.