Kill Running Project Process Add-In

• Download demo project - 13 Kb
• Download source - 19 Kb

Introduction

How many times have you been in the situation, during development, you had to kill the current project process for any reason (infinite loops, crazy threads, a wrong return value and so on) ? It happens continuously, I guess.

What to do then? I always have the Task Manager minimized to the System Tray and when I need to kill the project process I click it up, scrolling the tasks list, found mine end kill it. Too much time wasted! ... :)

So it came to my mind to simplify the killing procedure, making it as fastest as possible: Why not having a button in the IDE to do the job for us? An Add-In would help. So here it is.

Background

To understand the source code, it is just needed to read any other Add-in article in this CodeProject section.

The code

The DevStudio Add-Ins Wizard does the main job for us to crate an Add-In, in fact the code you have to implement is simply the one relative to what the Add-In you're creating stands for: in this case killing the active project running process.

The method to implement is ICommand::KillProcessCommandMethod()

STDMETHODIMP CCommands::KillProcessCommandMethod() 
{
  
  AFX_MANAGE_STATE(AfxGetStaticModuleState());

  // Let's simplify the conversion work between OLE 
  // strings and C strings ...
  USES_CONVERSION;
  
  CComPtr<IDispatch> iDisp=NULL;
  
  // Obtain the IDispatch pointer
  m_pApplication->get_ActiveProject(&iDisp);
  
  // Obtain the IGenericProject interface through the IDispatch interface
  CComQIPtr<IGenericProject, &__uuidof(IGenericProject)> pProject(iDisp);
  
  // Is there any active project? If there's none, get out gracefully
  if(pProject == NULL)
    return S_OK;
  
  // Prepare the project name string
  CComBSTR bstrName=NULL;
  
  // Obtain the name of the project
  pProject->get_Name(&bstrName);
  
  // We suppose that the name of the executable is the same 
  // as the project one, with an appended '.exe' extension.
  bstrName+=".exe";
  
  
  // We need to make some logic on the executable name now...
  
  // Convert an OLE string to a C constant string pointer 
  LPCTSTR stringa = OLE2T(bstrName);
  
  // Let's make our string editable
  LPSTR str = (LPSTR)stringa;
  
  // We need to know how long is the name of the 
  // executable because in the running process list
  // only 15 characters are reported, every character 
  // over the 15th is truncated:
  // i.e. 'MyApplication.exe'  is reported as 'MyApplication.e' and so on.
  
  int len = strlen(str);
  
  // Let's make some logic and if the length of the name is over 15, 
  // let's put NULLs on the extra characters.
  // This is needed because once we obtain the running process list, 
  // we will iterate on it and find the process to kill on a 
  // strcmp name basis.
  
  if(len > 15)
  {
    for(int i = 15; i < len; i++)
      if(*(str + i)!=NULL)
        *(str + i) = NULL;
  }
  
  
  // Let's take a snapshot of the running process list
  
  HANDLE hSnapShot=CreateToolhelp32Snapshot(TH32CS_SNAPPROCESS,0);
  
  // Prepare the struct to contains every process information
  
  PROCESSENTRY32* processInfo=new PROCESSENTRY32;
  processInfo->dwSize=sizeof(PROCESSENTRY32);

  DWORD processID = 0;
  BOOL bFound = FALSE;
  
  // Iterate through processes to find ours...
  
  while(Process32Next(hSnapShot,processInfo)!=FALSE)
  {
    // store the Process ID
    processID = processInfo->th32ProcessID;
    
    // Is this our running process to kill?
    if(strcmp(processInfo->szExeFile,str) == 0)
    {
      bFound = TRUE;
      break;
    }
  }

  CloseHandle(hSnapShot);
  
  if(bFound)
  {
    // Obtain the Process handle....
    HANDLE hProcess = OpenProcess(PROCESS_ALL_ACCESS,TRUE,processID);
    
    // and Kill it
    if(hProcess != NULL)
      TerminateProcess(hProcess,0);

  }

  return S_OK;
}

Hints

Remember to include in StdAfx.h the following header files:

#include <comdef.h>
#include <winbase.h>
#include <tlhelp32.h>

Copy the KillProcess.dll in the <Visual Studio Install Dir>\Common\MSDev98\Addins folder

Limitations

As stated in the code comments, we forced the name of the executable to be the same as the project one, plus an '.exe' extension.
this is not very portable. I tried to find through the IConfiguration interface or IBuildProject interface to obtain the name of the executable to be produced but maybe I followed the wrong way. If you have any hint or comment are always welcome. Thanks. Fabio

History

• 24 June 2004 v1.0