FileSystemWatcher - reliability and huuuuuge implementation

I must work there, see the feedback
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=315751

That is a very useful link. It is irritating that this class is unreliable - so predictable! Have you had any other feedback? Is this your test case?

I have used the filesystemwatcher to monitor files at my company (probably around 250 clients each monitoring their own network share location for new files created). I found that the biggest issue was that network interruptions meant that I had to catch the error raised and loop at intervals trying to re-initialize the filesystemwatcher until the connection was restored (otherwise the program keeps running but just desen't receive any events)

CodeCruiser: I have had a quick skim through those links and they are very useful. Thanks. I feel comfortable hooking into the Win32 API. What worries me is that this is what the FileSystemWatcher is trying to do and obviously has problems and therefore is unreliable. Why is it unreliable? Will I not just come across the same problems but in a more roundabout way?

Solar_Flare: I would be running the "watcher" on the device and building a file to be dumped on another server for evaluation. What do you think?

FileSystemWatcher is developed so that it just raises all file creation, modification, deletion events etc. When you hook into API yourself, you could handle the situations so that you do could handle the creation of a file properly. You could also code around the Watcher in way that you monitor the events being raised and match them to previous recent events to detect if multiple events are generated for same file etc.