I often encounter file locks once in a while and finding out which process is locking a specific file is a painful task without the proper tools (devenv.exe i think is the ultimate file locker).  Luckily Process Explorer exists to aid us with it.  

Some of the development scenarios is you can't delete a folder with a locked file in it.  A common scenario is when you created a virtual directory in IIS to a folder (web project or remoting project perhaps) and you want it to be deleted later.

We encountered a number of times that our build server had some problems in executing it's build script and i found out in the logs that a temporary folder for generating installers cannot be deleted because it is locked by guess what?  AVG antivirus.  Turns out that the scheduled scanning of files for our build server is during office hours so i immediately changed it to after-office hours.

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Posted 09-07-2006 12:13 PM by jokiz