Thursday, January 22, 2015

Graceful Console Exit



When writing console apps sometimes you want to delay the closing of the console window to give the user time to read the output. Often, if something went wrong, I would simply report the error to the standard output and immediately exit the application. However that did not work too well for my users; the exit message was not displayed long enough for them to read so they knew how to correct the issue. What I needed was something that give a user enough time to read the output, but not prevent the process from exiting if it was being ran as a scheduled/automated task. The solution I came up with was a countdown timer that would block execution from proceeding until it counted back from some number to zero.

Lets view the code, shall we:

public static void CountdownTimer(int Seconds = 5)
{
    Console.ResetColor();
    Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
    Console.Write("The application will now terminate...   ");

    if (Seconds < 1) return;
    if (Seconds > 9) Seconds = 9;

    for (int counter = Seconds * 10; counter > 0; counter--)
    {
        if (Console.KeyAvailable)
            return;

        if (counter % 10 == 0)
            Console.Write("\b{0}", (counter / 10));

        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100);
    }
}

I print each number as the timer counts down. Each time I print a new number, I place a backspace "\b" before it to erase the previous number. To avoid having to keep track how many character a digit prints to use the same number of backspaces, I just kept the function simple by limiting the number of seconds to a max of 9.
I check for Console.KeyAvailable to detect key strokes to skip the rest of the countdown and exit immediately. The reason I did 10 Sleeps of 100ms per second was to make the exit upon key press more responsive.