Introduction

I developed this SingleRun application to address a business requirement. The requirement called for a method to allow only one instance of an application, taking arguments into account, when a user clicked on a shortcut.

In addition to this, when the application is already running, clicking on shortcut should bring the application into focus.

Although I frequently use the application, it is a bit of a niche solution so sharing it, hoping that someone will find it useful.

Implementation

Step 1) Download Visual Studio Project

https://bitbucket.org/svermaak/singlerun/downloads/ (Source Code)

https://github.com/svermaak/downloads/raw/main/SingleRun.zip (Binary)

Step 2) Save to a convenient location (C:\Program Files\SingleRun in this article)

Step 3) Create a SingleRun shortcut. You can create a SingleRun shortcut with by one of two ways:

Method 1) Drag and drop

Method 2) Command line

SingleRun supports the following command line arguments:

SingleRun.exe scope workingfolder target arguments

scope: Computer or User

workingfolder: Working folder to change context to

target: The path the application to star

arguments: Argument of the target

Demo execution

I hope you found this tutorial useful. You are encouraged to ask questions, report any bugs or make any other comments about it below.