Here’s a question from a customer:<\/p>\n
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? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
When we asked how they were refreshing the Explorer window, we were expecting something like pressing F5 or calling
SHChangeNotify<\/code> withSHCNE_UPDATEDIR<\/code>, or maybe callingIShellView::Refresh<\/code> or possibly even callingWebBrowser.Refresh<\/code> from script. But we definitely didn’t expect this response: <\/p>\nI’m invoking the Process.Refresh() method from the <\/a>
System.Diagnostics<\/code><\/a> namespace. <\/p><\/blockquote>\nJust because a method is called
Refresh<\/code> doesn’t mean that it refreshes what you want. I think this is somebody who just saw a method name, perhaps inspired by IntelliSense<\/a> and— Boom! You have it!<\/a>—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 thatProcess.Refresh<\/code> has no chance of working. <\/p>\nSince it’s a method on the
Process<\/code> class, the method is applicable to all processes. But certainly there is no generic way to tell a process to refresh. This magicalRefresh<\/code> 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? <\/p>\nHow 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<\/i> 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<\/i> program’s window, then how can there be a standard way to refresh all<\/i> program windows? <\/p>\n
In this specific case, the
Process.Refresh<\/code> method refreshes theProcess<\/code> object’s internal cache of process properties. It doesn’t actually do anything to the process itself. How could it? <\/p>\n