Creating a new process that's not a child of the creating process

Question

I am developing an application in which a number of instances of a process, A, depend on a single instance of a process, B. The idea is that one of the instances of process A st

Answer 1

You can try to use the ManagementClass to launch a process and pass some CreateFlags, more specifically, the DETACHED_PROCESS flag. (You'll need to reference System.Management.)

private static void Main()
{
    using (var managementClass = new ManagementClass("Win32_Process"))
    {
        var processInfo = new ManagementClass("Win32_ProcessStartup");
        processInfo.Properties["CreateFlags"].Value = 0x00000008;

        var inParameters = managementClass.GetMethodParameters("Create");
        inParameters["CommandLine"] = "notepad.exe";
        inParameters["ProcessStartupInformation"] = processInfo;

        var result = managementClass.InvokeMethod("Create", inParameters, null);
        if ((result != null) && ((uint)result.Properties["ReturnValue"].Value != 0))
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Process ID: {0}", result.Properties["ProcessId"].Value);
        }
    }

    Console.ReadKey();
}

At least on my machine notepad is not considered a child process of my console test application.