获取引用项目的可执行文件名称

Question

I have a solution with two projects, a master and a slave. Both these projects are WinForms Applications. There's always one instance of the master running and multiple instances of the slaves. The slaves are started by the master. Right now I have the executable name of the slave hardcoded into the master's code, which works fine. However, I want to be able to get the executable name of the slave without hardcoding it, but by getting it through its reference. Is this possible, and how should I go about doing this?

This is what I currently have:

ProcessStartInfo startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo("Slave.exe") { Arguments = Args };
Process.Start(startInfo);

But I would like to replace "Slave.exe" with something dynamical. I have added an assembly reference to the slave project, having namespace Slave .

Answer 1

Thanks to @Postlagerkarte's suggestion, I solved my problem by using post build events. I have 4 different slave processes, let's call them SlaveProcessA to SlaveProcessD . First thing I did was make a class which can hold the executable names, and (de)serialize them:

public class ExeNames {
    [XmlIgnore]
    public bool IsLoaded {get; private set;}
    [XmlIgnore]
    const string Filename = "exenames.xml";
    public string SlaveAExe {get; set;}
    public string SlaveBExe {get; set;}
    public string SlaveDExe {get; set;}
    public string SlaveCExe {get; set;}

    public void Load() {
      var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ExeNames));
      using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(Filename)) {
        ExeNames End = serializer.Deserialize(reader) as ExeNames;
        if (End == null) return;
        SlaveAExe = End.SlaveAExe;
        SlaveBExe = End.SlaveBExe;
        SlaveDExe = End.SlaveDExe;
        SlaveCExe = End.SlaveCExe;
        IsLoaded = true;
      }
    }

    public void Save() {
      var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ExeNames));
      using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(Filename)) {
        serializer.Serialize(writer, this);
      }
    }
  }

After that, I created a new project called ExeNameSaver . This program takes 2 parameters: the code of the process, and the executable name:

namespace ExeNameSaver {
  class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
      if (args.Length < 2) throw new ArgumentException("2 Parameters are required");
      var Code = args[0];
      var Exe = args[1];
      ExeNames.ExeNames Exn = new ExeNames.ExeNames();
      try {
        Exn.Load();
      }
      catch {
        Console.WriteLine("Starting new file...");
      }
      switch (Code) {
        case "SlaveA":
          Exn.SlaveAExe = Exe;
          break;
        case "SlaveB":
          Exn.SlaveBExe = Exe;
          break;
        case "SlaveC":
          Exn.SlaveCExe = Exe;
          break;
        case "SlaveD":
          Exn.SlaveDExe = Exe;
          break;
        default:
          Console.WriteLine("Invalid process code: " + Code);
          break;
      }
      Exn.Save();
    }
  }
}

Then, I make sure that the ExeNameSaver is built first by altering the dependencies. Now I can use the ExeNameSaver program to save my executable names to an XML-file, by putting the following in the Post-build event command line of SlaveProcessA:

$(OutDir)ExeNameSaver.exe SlaveA $(TargetFileName)

And similarly for the other 3 slaves.

$(OutDir)ExeNameSaver.exe SlaveB $(TargetFileName)

...

$(OutDir)ExeNameSaver.exe SlaveC $(TargetFileName)

...

$(OutDir)ExeNameSaver.exe SlaveD $(TargetFileName)

Now after each build, the exenames.xml file will contain the executable names of my 4 processes. I can then load this XML using the same ExeNames class in my master program and use their names from there.