What is the correct way to create a single-instance WPF application?

Question

Using C# and WPF under .NET (rather than Windows Forms or console), what is the correct way to create an application that can only be run as a single instance?

I kno

Answer 1

So many answers to such a seemingly simple question. Just to shake things up a little bit here is my solution to this problem.

Creating a Mutex can be troublesome because the JIT-er only sees you using it for a small portion of your code and wants to mark it as ready for garbage collection. It pretty much wants to out-smart you thinking you are not going to be using that Mutex for that long. In reality you want to hang onto this Mutex for as long as your application is running. The best way to tell the garbage collector to leave you Mutex alone is to tell it to keep it alive though out the different generations of garage collection. Example:

var m = new Mutex(...);
...
GC.KeepAlive(m);

I lifted the idea from this page: http://www.ai.uga.edu/~mc/SingleInstance.html