May be OT: Is there a way to write something in vb.net to...

[Ben]

Hi all-

I been running to this problem quite a few times now. My groups
supports a number of users that are dispersed through out the building.
We have a few automated processes that generate some pdf/doc/xls/txt
files.

These files get overwritten everyday. But on a number of occasions,
users would forget to close out of the files and so the next morning, it
bombs the process because it cannot get a exclusive handle on the files
to write to them.

Here's my question:
Is there a way to quickly write up some code in vb.net to see who has a
file opened? I am not a vb.net user, but I am trying to get into it.


What facility does the .net framework/ vb.net provide, if there's any,
to make this possible? Please share with me your thoughts. I tried to
do a search on it, but mostly they are for windows administration. But
I want to provide this app to our group so that we can run it against a
file and see which network user has a lock on the file.

Thanks,

Ben

 

[Ben]

Webooth,

Thanks for sharing the information.
One follow up question, once we found out who the user is having a lock
on the file, we would like to send an email notice to him/her. This
part is trivial. But if the user is unresponsive, say, not in office,
but never bothered to close the file ( which happened a few times), we
would like to terminate his/her connection to the file or forcibly kick
the user out of the file so that we can continue with our daily morning
process.

Is there a way to forcibly kick a user out of a file, any file,
pdf/doc/xls/txt/csv (our morning process produces a bunch of these files
and we can't have them lock by any user in the early morning.) And the
process that produce these files do not have a facility to move them to
another location. Mgmt doesn't want to spend any $ on the upgrade.

Thanks for sharing any thought you might have on this.

Ben