[.NET C#] Getting a BaseCollection countaining everyfiles on the computer

You can obtain the names of all accessible files on a particular drive using this recursive method:

public static string[] FindAllFiles (DirectoryInfo dirInfo)

{ 

   List filePaths = new List();

 

   FileInfo[] fia = null;

   try

   { 

      fia = dirInfo.GetFiles();  

      if (fia.Length > 0)

      {

         foreach(FileInfo fi in fia)

         {

            filePaths.Add(fi.FullName); 

         }

      }

      DirectoryInfo[] dia = dirInfo.GetDirectories(); 

      if (dia.Length > 0) 

      { 

         foreach (DirectoryInfo di in dia) 

         { 

            filePaths.AddRange(FindAllFiles(di));

         }

      } 

    }

    catch(UnauthorizedAccessException)

    {

       Console.WriteLine("Couldn't access {0}", dirInfo.FullName); // or log to file

       fia = new FileInfo[0];

    }     

    if (filePaths.Count > 0) 

    { 

       return filePaths.ToArray(); 

    } 

    return new string[0]; 

} 

You can also iterate through all logical drives on the machine, calling this method on each drive, as follows:

DriveInfo[] allDrives = DriveInfo.GetDrives();

List allFiles = new List();

foreach (DriveInfo d in allDrives)

{

   if (d.IsReady) allFiles.AddRange(FindAllFiles(new DirectoryInfo(d.Name)));

}

Note that this code may take a long time to execute on a typical machine with several hundred thousand files and the continual 'unauthorized access exceptions' you get when trying to access system directories doesn't help. 

BaseCollection isn't intended for application developers who should use CollectionBase instead (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.basecollection.aspx). If you must use it, then you'd have to create a derived class with a private List field which you fill from the constructor. In fact, looking at the List property, you'd have to use an ArrayList rather than a List which is also bad news.

However, there may not be much point in creating a custom collection when a List may already do everything you're likely to want.