Enumerate managed processes

If you ever needed to enumerate managed (.NET) processes you probably found that this is a difficult task. There is no single API that is robust and guarantees correct result. Let’s see what the available options are:

You can take a look at the following examples:

Unfortunately, each one of these approaches has a hidden trap. You cannot enumerate 64bit processes from a 32bit process and you cannot enumerate 32bit processes from a 64bit process. After all, it makes sense because most of these techniques rely on reading another process memory.

This is a well-known issue. Microsoft has provided a tool called clrver.exe that suffers from the same problem. The following screen shots demonstrate it.

As we can see the 32bit clrver.exe can enumerate 32bit processes only. If you try it on 64bit process you get the error “Failed getting running runtimes, error code 8007012b”. The same is valid for the 64bit scenario. The 64bit clrver.exe can enumerate 64bit processes only. If you try it on 32bit process you get “PID XXXX doesn’t have a runtime loaded”.

A lot of people tried to solve this issue. The most common solution is to spawn a new process on 64bit Windows. If your process is 32bit then you have to spawn a 64bit process and vice versa. However, this is a really ugly “solution”. You have to deal with IPC and other things.

However, there is a Microsoft tool that can enumerate both 32bit and 64bit managed processes. This is, of course, Visual Studio. In the Attach to Process dialog you can see the column “Type” that shows what CLR versions are loaded if any.

I don’t know how Visual Studio does the trick so I implemented another solution. I am not very happy with the approach that I used, but it seems stable and fast. I also added support for Silverlight (see process 7232).

You can find a sample source code at the end of the posting.

EnumManagedProcesses.zip