What’s the difference between Process and ProcessStartInfo in C#?

Question

What’s the difference between Process and ProcessStartInfo? I’ve used both to launch external programs but there has to be a reason there are two ways to do it. Here are two examples.

Process notePad = new Process();
notePad.StartInfo.FileName = "notepad.exe";
notePad.StartInfo.Arguments = "ProcessStart.cs";
notePad.Start();

and

ProcessStartInfo startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo();
startInfo.FileName = "notepad.exe";
startInfo.Arguments = "ProcessStart.cs";
Process.Start(startInfo);

Answer 1

They are pretty close to the same, both are from the Process class. And there are actually 4 other overloads to Process.Start other than what you mentioned, all static.

One is a static method way to do it. It returns the Process object representing the process that is started. You could for example start a process with a single line of code by using this way.

And the other is a member method way to do it which reuses the current object instead of returning a new one.