Here’s a question from a customer:

I made some changes related to my shell extension [details omitted], but the changes don’t show up in the Explorer window when I refresh it. Any suggestions on how to solve this problem?

When we asked how they were refreshing the Explorer window, we were expecting something like pressing F5 or calling SHChangeNotify with SHCNE_UPDATEDIR, or maybe calling IShellView::Refresh or possibly even calling WebBrowser.Refresh from script. But we definitely didn’t expect this response:

I’m invoking the Process.Refresh() method from the System.Diagnostics namespace.

Just because a method is called Refresh doesn’t mean that it refreshes what you want. I think this is somebody who just saw a method name, perhaps inspired by IntelliSense and— Boom! You have it!—assumed it did what was needed without actually reading the documentation to check. But you don’t even need to read the documentation to know that Process.Refresh has no chance of working.

Since it’s a method on the Process class, the method is applicable to all processes. But certainly there is no generic way to tell a process to refresh. This magical Refresh method would have to know how to refresh Explorer windows, Firefox web pages, iTunes mp3 tags… And what would it even mean to refresh, say, a Notepad window? Does that mean to throw away all changes and reload the original document?

How do you know that there is no generic way to tell a process to refresh? Well, for one thing, a single process like Explorer can be viewing multiple objects that can be refreshed; which one are you refreshing? Second, when you write your own program, how do you implement refresh? Do you respond to some standard system Refresh message? Or do you just add a Refresh option to your program’s main menu and give it some arbitrary command ID? If there’s not even a standard way to refresh your program’s window, then how can there be a standard way to refresh all program windows?

In this specific case, the Process.Refresh method refreshes the Process object’s internal cache of process properties. It doesn’t actually do anything to the process itself. How could it?

It’s like thinking that the Matrix.Rotate method rotates the entries in a matrix.

Epilogue

Actually, I’m scared by this customer’s question for another reason: The fact that they even mentioned Process.Refresh suggests to me that they wrote their shell extension in managed code, which we already know is strongly disrecommended.