How to kill Excel.exe process?

I was developing an application where I need to export data from an application page to a Excel sheet. I also required to import an existing Excel and reading the data int an object.

The things were going fine in order to import and export but there was a problem in terms of memory leak.

For all the operation you perform to open a Excel file or to write a Excel file a process Excel.exe is created and which does not get kill and it resides in the memory until you delete it manually.

I spent a lot of time just to find the solution. I tried many more solution but the one which worked for me was excellent and good enough. I thought lets share the solution here.

Here is the code:

Class Sample{

Hashtable myHashtable;

Private void ReadExcel()

{

CheckExcelProcesses(); // call this to find out all the processes instances running currently

//Open a Excel a file

//Do all operation needed

KillExcel();

}

private void CheckExcelProcesses()

{

Process[] AllProcesses = Process.GetProcessesByName("excel");

myHashtable = new Hashtable();

int iCount = 0;

foreach ( Process ExcelProcess in AllProcesses) {

myHashtable.Add(ExcelProcess.Id, iCount);

iCount = iCount + 1;

}

private void KillExcel()

{

Process[] AllProcesses = Process.GetProcessesByName("excel");

// check to kill the right process

foreach ( Process ExcelProcess in AllProcesses) {

if (myHashtable.ContainsKey(ExcelProcess.Id) == false)

ExcelProcess.Kill();

}

AllProcesses = null;

}

}