Drive Information

To obtain information about the various drives in your computer you can use the DriveInfo class.  This class contains all sorts of information regarding the drive it references.  For this example I will just show you how to obtain the total and free space in Gigabytes for the drive.  In this example I will be retrieving info about the C: drive.  Also, don’t forget that the sizes returned are in bytes and you should convert them to more meaningful types. Quick info about byte conversion:

Divide by:
2^10 for KB
2^20 for MB
2^30 for GB
2^40 for TB

DriveInfo info = new DriveInfo(“C:\\”);

int freeSpace = (int)(info.AvailableFreeSpace / Math.Pow(2, 30));
int totalSpace = (int)(info.TotalSize / Math.Pow(2, 30));

Physical Memory

To obtain information about your computer’s physical memory you have two options.  You can use P/Invoke, which offers much better performance, or WMI for .NET.  I will show you using P/Invoke because it’s faster and because I grew up with Win32 and C++ and have sentimental attachment to it.  There is a little bit of funkiness to obtaining information about your physical memory in that there are multiple ways to obtain the available memory but only two ways to obtain the total memory (which are p/invoke and WMI).  If all you need to know is the amount of available physical memory you can use the PerformanceCounter class which doesn’t require p/invoke but does come with a serious performance hit.  Example:

var memCounter = new PerformanceCounter("Memory", "Available MBytes");
var available = Math.Round(memCounter.NextValue() / Math.Pow(2, 10), 2); // Because our performance counter returns the available memory in MB we only need to divide by one magnitude to get to GB

If you want to know both available and physical then you would use p/invoke and Win32 as so:

// Win32 P/Invoke imports

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
private class MEMORYSTATUSEX
{
public uint dwLength;
public uint dwMemoryLoad;
public ulong ulTotalPhys;
public ulong ulAvailPhys;
public ulong ulTotalPageFile;
public ulong ulAvailPageFile;
public ulong ulTotalVirtual;
public ulong ulAvailVirtual;
public ulong ulAvailExtendedVirtual;
public MEMORYSTATUSEX()
{
this.dwLength = (uint)Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(MEMORYSTATUSEX));
}
}

[return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)]
[DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)]
static extern bool GlobalMemoryStatusEx([In, Out] MEMORYSTATUSEX lpBuffer);

public static double GetAvailablePhysicalMemory()
{
ulong availableMemory = 0;

MEMORYSTATUSEX memStatus = new MEMORYSTATUSEX();
if (GlobalMemoryStatusEx(memStatus))
{
availableMemory = memStatus.ulAvailPhys;
}

return availableMemory;
}

public static double GetTotalPhysicalMemory()
{
ulong installedMemory = 0;

MEMORYSTATUSEX memStatus = new MEMORYSTATUSEX();
if (GlobalMemoryStatusEx(memStatus))
{
installedMemory = memStatus.ulTotalPhys;
}

return installedMemory;
}

Then use those methods as so:

var Available = Math.Round(Win32Helper.GetAvailablePhysicalMemory() / Math.Pow(2, 30), 2); // I like my available to be semi-accurate so I only round to two decimals
var Total = Math.Round(Win32Helper.GetTotalPhysicalMemory() / Math.Pow(2, 30), 0, MidpointRounding.AwayFromZero); // I like my total to be a nice round number so I round up and chop the decimals

That’s it.  Pretty simple.

First off, let’s start with the container to hold our nifty FlowDocument.  There are numerous options for displaying FlowDocuments: FlowDocumentReader, FlowDocumentScrollViewer, and FlowDocumentPageViewer.  We will be using FlowDocumentScrollViewer since it allows hiding of the default toolbar and is the easiest to configure to quickly display our fake document in a format that is desired.  Here is the definition for the FlowDocumentScrollViewer:

<FlowDocumentScrollViewer Focusable="False" IsToolBarVisible="False"
                          ScrollViewer.CanContentScroll="False"
                          ScrollViewer.HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled"
                          ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled"
                          HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Center" />

This will set our FlowDocumentScrollViewer up so that it is purely for displaying our fake document and won’t get in the way of our UI.  No scrolling, no interaction.  Next we need to design our document layout: 

<FlowDocument>     
    <Paragraph FontWeight="Normal" Foreground="WhiteSmoke" TextAlignment="Left"> 

        <Floater Width="48" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="0,0,4,0" Padding="0">
           <BlockUIContainer>
                 <Image Source="file://c:/temp/bacon.png" Width="48" Height="34" />
           </BlockUIContainer>  
       </Floater><Run Text="The Baconator" FontSize="16" Foreground="WhiteSmoke" TextDecorations="Underline" /><LineBreak /><Run Text="Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet adipisicing t-bone sirloin filet mignon ribeye. Tenderloin ex strip steak, pork chop hamburger est." FontSize="12" Foreground="WhiteSmoke" />    
    </Paragraph>     
</FlowDocument>

There are some caveats to using FlowDocuments.  The one that you need to look out for most is that FlowDocuments are very literal, meaning it will display any white space you include in your xaml.  This is why the Run elements and LineBreaks are all on the same line because any spaces and/or line returns you place in there will be displayed in the output.  Also, by default FlowDocuments use Justify as their text alignment so if you don’t want your output getting spaced out then make sure you set your TextAlignment to Left on the Paragraph.

Obviously for discussion and sample purposes I used literal text in the flow document but you can easily replace the literal text with Bindings in the Runs (assuming using .NET 4.0) and the Image.  I hope you found this useful.  Here is the full xaml for the visual shown above.  Obviously you will need to tweak this to suit your needs but this should give you a great start.

  
<Border Background="#2B3346" BorderBrush="#212937" BorderThickness="1" Width="250" Height="100">
   <FlowDocumentScrollViewer Focusable="False" IsToolBarVisible="False" ScrollViewer.CanContentScroll="False" 
           ScrollViewer.HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled" ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled" 
           HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Center" Margin=”0,-5,0,0”>
      <FlowDocumentScrollViewer.Document>
         <FlowDocument> 
            <Paragraph FontWeight="Normal" Foreground="WhiteSmoke" TextAlignment="Left"> 
               <Floater Width="48" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="0,0,4,0" Padding="0">
                  <BlockUIContainer>
                     <Image Source="file://c:/temp/bacon.png" Width="48" Height="34" />
                 </BlockUIContainer> 
              </Floater><Run Text="The Baconator" FontSize="16" Foreground="WhiteSmoke" TextDecorations="Underline" /><LineBreak /><Run Text="Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet adipisicing t-bone sirloin filet mignon ribeye. Tenderloin ex strip steak, pork chop hamburger est." FontSize="12" Foreground="WhiteSmoke" /> 
           </Paragraph> 
         </FlowDocument>
      </FlowDocumentScrollViewer.Document>
   </FlowDocumentScrollViewer>
</Border>