Launch Chrome and Other Applications in C#

Hi Everyone,

I was recently asked if I could launch Chrome and other applications in C#. I couldn’t see a reason why we couldn’t, as it’s fairly easy to do this type of operation inside PowerShell.

This is only on my website!

Updated 12th Feb 2025 — So this post has taken off recently, so I thought I would come back and update it. This’ll only really matter to me, but making sure my readers have the most up to date content always puts a twinkly in my eye!

This all came about as I wanted to automate my start up procedure in the morning. I had a bunch of regularly used application and Chrome tabs that I was getting tired of starting manually. I thought

Why not spend all day automating it, rather than spending 5 minutes to open them?

Launch Chrome and Other Applications in C#

So I started inside my Program.cs file and created a new Process object. Using this object, I assigned some StartInfo. Let’s go through this one line at a time:

Create the new Process object:

Process process = new Process();

I could now pass in the path to my Chrome executable using the StartInfo.FileName variable:

process.StartInfo.FileName = @"C:\Path\To\Chrome.exe";

Now, I could pass in some Arguments to the process. Those mainly being the URLs I wanted to open:

process.StartInfo.Arguments = @"https://bbc.co.uk";

After this, I told the process to start a new window as I didn’t want it to add these tabs to any existing Chrome windows:

process.StartInfo.Arguments += " --new-windows";

I could then start the process and watch Chrome do exactly as I had told it:

process.Start();

Example Scenarios

Open a specific URL inside an existing Chrome window:

Process process = new Process();
process.StartInfo.FileName = @"C:\Path\To\Chrome.exe";
process.StartInfo.Arguments = @"https://bbc.co.uk" ;
process.Start();