C# – Get path to Portable Device in Vista

I've defined the following property as we use this often in unit testing.

public static string AssemblyDirectory
{
    get
    {
        string codeBase = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase;
        UriBuilder uri = new UriBuilder(codeBase);
        string path = Uri.UnescapeDataString(uri.Path);
        return Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
    }
}

The Assembly.Location property sometimes gives you some funny results when using NUnit (where assemblies run from a temporary folder), so I prefer to use CodeBase which gives you the path in URI format, then UriBuild.UnescapeDataString removes the File:// at the beginning, and GetDirectoryName changes it to the normal windows format.

Editor's note: Although this answer contains some useful information, it is factually incorrect about the workings of Directory.Delete. Please read the comments for this answer, and other answers to this question.

I ran into this problem before.

The root of the problem is that this function does not delete files that are within the directory structure. So what you'll need to do is create a function that deletes all the files within the directory structure then all the directories before removing the directory itself. I know this goes against the second parameter but it's a much safer approach. In addition, you will probably want to remove READ-ONLY access attributes from the files right before you delete them. Otherwise that will raise an exception.

Just slap this code into your project.

public static void DeleteDirectory(string target_dir)
{
    string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(target_dir);
    string[] dirs = Directory.GetDirectories(target_dir);

    foreach (string file in files)
    {
        File.SetAttributes(file, FileAttributes.Normal);
        File.Delete(file);
    }

    foreach (string dir in dirs)
    {
        DeleteDirectory(dir);
    }

    Directory.Delete(target_dir, false);
}

Also, for me I personally add a restriction on areas of the machine that are allowed to be deleted because do you want someone to call this function on C:\WINDOWS (%WinDir%) or C:\.