How to run an external application through a C# application?

An external application can be run from a C# application using Process. A process is a program that is running on your computer. This can be anything from a small background task, such as a spell-checker or system events handler to a full-blown application like Notepad etc.

Each process provides the resources needed to execute a program. Each process is started with a single thread, known as the primary thread. A process can have multiple threads in addition to the primary thread. Processes are heavily dependent on system resources available while threads require minimal amounts of resource, so a process is considered as heavyweight while a thread is termed as a lightweight process. Process is present in System.Diagnostics namespace.

Example to run notepad from C# application

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
namespace DemoApplication{
   class Program{
      static void Main(){
         Process notepad = new Process();
         notepad.StartInfo.FileName = "notepad.exe";
         notepad.StartInfo.Arguments = "DemoText";
         notepad.Start();
         Console.ReadLine();
      }
   }
}

The above output shows the console application opened Notepad with the name DemoText provided in the arguments.

Example to run browser from C# application

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
namespace DemoApplication{
   class Program{
      static void Main(){
         Process.Start("https://www.google.com/");
         Console.ReadLine();
      }
   }
}

The above code will open the browser and redirect to www.google.com.