I am working on a console application, written in C#, where I trigger Application.Run() to manage the system tray. The application itself is window-less.
Here's the challenge I am encountering - when the user closes the application, I need to do cleanup, and make sure that I remove the application icon from the system tray. Easy enough to do when I have a console window attached and allocated since I can use SetConsoleCtrlHandler.
However, the problems start when I do not have a console window allocated and attached (since the application runs like that most of the time). I want to gracefully terminate the process from another process, so that I can call SetConsoleCtrlHandler in my application and do the cleanup. But, all the guidance that I find on doing that for Windows is through sending WM_CLOSE messages, which would not apply since I do not have any windows available for the application.
So, considering that the application in question is launched with CreateProcess, I have the process ID, handle, and main thread ID.
Question: is there a way for me to gracefully tell the other application to terminate without calling TerminateProcess (which would not give any leeway to do any cleanup)?
I am thinking I might need to implement a named pipe so that I can communicate between the client application and the "server" in this case, but it feels like overkill for having a way to nicely ask the process to wrap things up.