How to suspend and resume an application on windows?

Question

Is there any way to suspend an application execution, store its process image to a file, and restore it later (keeping the application as it was at the moment of suspension)? What I want to do is something like an "hibernate" for applications on WinXP.

Is there any application capable of doing this?

What I have so far, is a virtualized system using vmware, where I can suspend and resume applications, but to accomplish the task, I have to suspend the whole virtualized system.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I can only think of one example when this is done. Unfortunately, it's not done under favourable conditions! You can set up the operating system to create a memory dump whenever a process crashes. This crash dump can then be loaded into a debugger, which can see the exact state of every variable in the process at the time it crashed. I presume you want something similar, but without the process crashing? ;-)

Answer 2

Have you looked at VMWare ThinApp? It sounds like it does what you're trying to achieve...

Answer 3

I could imagine if you had an object that would maintain the state of your application and always base the UI on that state object.

When your application is closing, that state object could be serialized/saved. When the application starts back up, it would load/de-serialize your state object and bring your UI back to where you left it.