How can I get the PID of the parent process of my application

Question

My winform application is launched by another application (the parent), I need determine the pid of the application which launch my application using C#.

Answer 1

WMI is the easier way to do this in C#. The Win32_Process class has the ParentProcessId property. Here's an example:

using System; using System.Management;  // <=== Add Reference required!! using System.Diagnostics;  class Program {     public static void Main() {         var myId = Process.GetCurrentProcess().Id;         var query = string.Format("SELECT ParentProcessId FROM Win32_Process WHERE ProcessId = {0}", myId);         var search = new ManagementObjectSearcher("root\\CIMV2", query);         var results = search.Get().GetEnumerator();         results.MoveNext();         var queryObj = results.Current;         var parentId = (uint)queryObj["ParentProcessId"];         var parent = Process.GetProcessById((int)parentId);         Console.WriteLine("I was started by {0}", parent.ProcessName);         Console.ReadLine();     } } 

Output when run from Visual Studio:

I was started by devenv