How to c# programmatically or command line open explorer.exe to the "Recycle Bin"

Question

I want a WPF button that will open explorer.exe in Windows 7|8 directly into the "Recycle Bin". This is because my app erases a lot of files, and I want to provide the user with a quick way to restore files. The command line arguments don't work, possibly because the "Recycle Bin" is a virtual directory. I have tried using "$Recycle Bin". Explorer.exe /root, where a is a virtual file fails. Trying to protect the space in Recycle\ Bin does not seem to work as well.

Here is working code from Scott Powell that I tested and am using. Thank you Scott@

    private void ExploreTrashBin ( )
        {
        String str_RecycleBinDir = String.Format(@"C:\$Recycle.Bin\{0}", UserPrincipal.Current.Sid);
        Process . Start ( "explorer.exe" , str_RecycleBinDir );
        }
    private void TrashBin_Button_Click ( object sender , RoutedEventArgs e )
        {
        ExploreTrashBin ( );
        }

Answer 1

You could execute following command in order to achieve this,

start shell:RecycleBinFolder

From your C# code you could use,

System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("explorer.exe", "shell:RecycleBinFolder");

Answer 2

It is already implemented in Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.FileSystem class in .Net (so C# natively supports the use of this).

This way, you don't need run shell command : just delete files/folders programmatically as if done interactively with Windows Explorer!

using Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO;

FileSystem.DeleteFile(...)
FileSystem.DeleteDirectory(...)