If you want to keep your application opened, you have to do something in order to keep its process alive. The below example is the simplest one, to be put at the end of your program:
while (true) ;
However, it'll cause the CPU to overload, as it's therefore forced to iterate infinitely.
At this point, you can opt to use System.Windows.Forms.Application class (but it requires you to add System.Windows.Forms reference):
Application.Run();
This doesn't leak CPU and works successfully.
In order to avoid to add System.Windows.Forms reference, you can use a simple trick, the so-called spin waiting, importing System.Threading:
SpinWait.SpinUntil(() => false);
This also works perfectly, and it basically consists of a while loop with a negated condition that is returned by the above lambda method. Why isn't this overloading CPU? You can look at the source code here; anyway, it basically waits some CPU cycle before iterating over.
You can also create a message looper, which peeks the pending messages from the system and processes each of them before passing to the next iteration, as follows:
[DebuggerHidden, DebuggerStepperBoundary, DebuggerNonUserCode, DllImport("user32.dll", EntryPoint = "PeekMessage")]
public static extern int PeekMessage(out NativeMessage lpMsg, IntPtr hWnd, int wMsgFilterMin, int wMsgFilterMax, int wRemoveMsg);
[DebuggerHidden, DebuggerStepperBoundary, DebuggerNonUserCode, DllImport("user32.dll", EntryPoint = "GetMessage")]
public static extern int GetMessage(out NativeMessage lpMsg, IntPtr hWnd, int wMsgFilterMin, int wMsgFilterMax);
[DebuggerHidden, DebuggerStepperBoundary, DebuggerNonUserCode, DllImport("user32.dll", EntryPoint = "TranslateMessage")]
public static extern int TranslateMessage(ref NativeMessage lpMsg);
[DebuggerHidden, DebuggerStepperBoundary, DebuggerNonUserCode, DllImport("user32.dll", EntryPoint = "DispatchMessage")]
public static extern int DispatchMessage(ref NativeMessage lpMsg);
[DebuggerHidden, DebuggerStepperBoundary, DebuggerNonUserCode]
public static bool ProcessMessageOnce()
{
NativeMessage message = new NativeMessage();
if (!IsMessagePending(out message))
return true;
if (GetMessage(out message, IntPtr.Zero, 0, 0) == -1)
return true;
Message frameworkMessage = new Message()
{
HWnd = message.handle,
LParam = message.lParam,
WParam = message.wParam,
Msg = (int)message.msg
};
if (Application.FilterMessage(ref frameworkMessage))
return true;
TranslateMessage(ref message);
DispatchMessage(ref message);
return false;
}
Then, you can loop safely by doing something like this:
while (true)
ProcessMessageOnce();