VBA monitor folder for new files - vba

Question

So I'm trying to write a VBA program that will monitor a folder for new files and then do stuff with them. I've found some promising examples on using the WMI api:
Receive notification of file creation in VBA without polling
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/211547-monitor-new-files-folder.html
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2004/10/11/how-can-i-automatically-run-a-script-any-time-a-file-is-added-to-a-folder/
But here's the thing: It seems like the tack everyone takes with these examples is to wire the VBA into an Excel spreadsheet as a macro. People treat Excel as a poor-man's programming environment. Fair enough. The problem is, I need this to run when the user is closed out out this magic excel file with the macro.
Something tells me I need to make a full windows application in visual studio with VB6.0 or C# and run the application in the background as some kind of a scheduled task. Is that the right path to take or is there something simple that I'm missing in these Excel/VBA tutorials?
(Apologies for the generality of the question. I know that the community appreciates specific questions.)

Answer 1

VBA and VBScript is similar. For WMI pretty much the same. Here are three scripts. You can also wire up WMI with event handlers so you can have multiple events rather than one as shown here.
VB6 is VBA that can be compiled into an exe. VB6 hosts the VBA language as does Office.
InstanceCreationEvent
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colMonitoredEvents = objWMIService.ExecNotificationQuery _
("SELECT * FROM __InstanceCreationEvent WITHIN 10 WHERE Targetinstance ISA 'CIM_DirectoryContainsFile' and TargetInstance.GroupComponent= 'Win32_Directory.Name=""c:\\\\scripts""'")
Do
Set objLatestEvent = colMonitoredEvents.NextEvent
Wscript.Echo objLatestEvent.TargetInstance.PartComponent
Loop
InstanceModificationEvent
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colMonitoredEvents = objWMIService.ExecNotificationQuery _
("SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 10 WHERE Targetinstance ISA 'CIM_DirectoryContainsFile' and TargetInstance.GroupComponent= 'Win32_Directory.Name=""c:\\\\scripts""'")
Do
Set objLatestEvent = colMonitoredEvents.NextEvent
Wscript.Echo objLatestEvent.TargetInstance.PartComponent
Loop
InstanceDeletionEvent
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colMonitoredEvents = objWMIService.ExecNotificationQuery _
("SELECT * FROM __InstanceDeletionEvent WITHIN 10 WHERE Targetinstance ISA 'CIM_DirectoryContainsFile' and TargetInstance.GroupComponent= 'Win32_Directory.Name=""c:\\\\scripts""'")
Do
Set objLatestEvent = colMonitoredEvents.NextEvent
Wscript.Echo objLatestEvent.TargetInstance.PartComponent
Loop

Answer 2

I don't think Excel is a good solution for this kind of need. What about using VB.NET to do the work?
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/150149-using-filesystemwatcher-in-vbnet/
Yes, it's overkill, but if you get into it, you'll find all kinds of other really cool things that you can do with VB.NET. I love working with Excel, but I'm really a huge proponent of using the right tool for the job.

Answer 3

Ok- I found a solution for this. It's not pretty, but you can copy the blurb of code found at this tutorial:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa383665(v=VS.85).aspx
into an excel macro and it will work almost without modification, scheduling a task which will occur even after excel has closed down. The solution is to use VBA to grab an instance of the task scheduler
Set service = CreateObject("Schedule.Service")
call service.Connect()
And then perform all of the verbose configurations on that object to schedule the task. From there it's only a skip hop and a jump to write an other macro that will actually do the deed on the folder.