total progress reports

i know how to increase a progress bar for each item I am going to be performing my actions on (like file copy)
but overall how can I find out the progress?

the way its working now is:

create an array of file extensions I wish to find of files
foreach currentExtention in the extentions

get files in specific directory of the extension current extension
foreach current file in theFiles found

increase progBar

next

next


but what about doing overall progress?
one way was to do that but get the total number of files found, set that as a maxvalue of the totalProgBar then increment that on each file copy but that would be bad practice

The only way to provide a proportional view of the current progress is to know exactly what represents the action being complete. If your progress represents the number of files or bytes operated on then the only way to be able to provide a current progress is to know what proportion of the total that represents. That means that you must count the total number of files or bytes or whatever before you start. Have you noticed how when you copy a large number of files in Windows Explorer the progress dialogue doesn't get displayed right away? Ever wondered what Windows is doing in that time?

yes yes and yes :) Thanks for that, I knew it would be something like that but was not sure if I was thinking clearly, thanks!