Develop Reference

Create a Windows service without the use of a timer [duplicate]

I made a Window service and let it work automatically and under localsystem account, when the service starts it fires this message for me and then stops
The [service name] service on local computer started and then stopped. Some Services stop automatically if they are not in use by another services or programs.
What's the problem and what's the solution?

Either you are not starting any threads on the OnStart method to do work, or there is an exception raised within your OnStart method.
If an exception is thrown, it will appear in the Windows Event log. The Windows Event log is a good place to start in any case.
Generally an OnStart method looks like this:
Thread _thread;
protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
// Comment in to debug
// Debugger.Break()
// Do initial setup and initialization
Setup();
// Kick off a thread to do work
_thread = new Thread(new MyClass().MyMethod)
_thread.Start();
// Exit this method to indicate the service has started
}

This particular error message means what it says - that your service has started but then quite soon it exited for some reason. The good news is that your service is actually doing something, so you have the executable configured and running as a service properly.
Once started, for some reason it is quitting. You need to find out why this is. Add some debugging to tell you its up and running and known exit cases. If that doesn't reveal the problem then add some debugging to let you know it's still running and work backwards from when that stops.

Are you tracing out any debug information? Most likely an exception is being thrown during your initialization. I would trace out all your exceptions and use Debugview to view them.

I had a similar problem that occurred because my Event Logs were full and the service was unable to write to them. As such, it was impossible to debug by looking for messages in the Event Viewer. I put a try/catch and dumped the exception out to a file. I had to change the settings on my logs to fill as needed instead of every 7 days and this allowed the services to start.
Of course, the root of the problem for me is that I have a nVidia driver issue that is flooding my event logs and now I'm probably beating on the disk, but that's another issue.

Maybe you need to run the service as Local System Account. See this post by Srinivas Ganaparthi.

I had the same issue starting JBoss, then I changed the JAVA_HOME variable, it worked for me. It was the JBoss version that doesn't support the 1.6, it supports 1.5.

I had similar problem and it turned out in my case that the program simply crashed in OnStart method. It tried to read some file that it couldn't find but I suppose that any other program crash would give the same result. In case of Windows forms application you would get some error message but here it was just "your service started and stopped"
If you ever need, like me to read some files from the directory where Windows Service .exe is located, check this topic:
Getting full path for Windows Service

In my case, a method in my service, was being called recursively (as no terminate condition being true) and after specific time my service was being stopped.

WCF service hosted in Windows service - not working

I've created the WCF service and some simple WPF application consuming it. When I'm running the project from within Visual Studio, the WCF Test Client opens and the application works just fine, method defined in service work.
But I need to host this WCF service in a Windows Service. I've followed this, installed the services using Installutil.exe and the ran the service. Everything went fine, it's working.
Yet, when I'm trying to open the executable file with WPF application directly from the debug folder of the app, I'm getting this error:
zad8. has stopped working
After choosing the option to debug it with new instance of VS I get
XamlParseException occured in PresentationFramework.dll
The stack trace shows something like:
connection can't be started, because the target computer is actively refusing it
Do you have any idea what could go wrong?

Fortunately, I've managed to come up with solution. I think I should post it, maybe one day it will help somebody:)
I actually did two mistakes, but one of them was unfortunately caused by the mentioned tutorial (here) in connection with my temporary blackout.
In step 5, point 8 of this tutorial, there's an example of overriding OnStart() method:
protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
if (myServiceHost != null)
{
myServiceHost.Close();
}
myServiceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(Service1));
myServiceHost.Open();
}
Beware, that Service1 is ambiguous in this context, because it's name of the Windows Service project class as well as the name of WCF Service class. It should be written with fully qualified name (here it is WcfServiceLibrary1.Service1). In my case, the service name was different, and I just put the Service1 in there in a hurry. Anyway..
In case, someone has it all behind and still encounters the same problem (with app stopped working), I think that you should try open the project in Visual Studio and try to debug the client consuming application as a new instance (right click on the project-> Debug -> Start as new instance...).
It might seem trivial, but when u hit F5 or Ctrl+F5 then even if u have only those project set as startup project, VS will host it's client anyway. In my case it did matter, because I needed to use isolation storage file. And as it was kept on the service side, then I had this file created in IIS server created by VS. Somehow, my method of creating such file had set FileMode.Open() and it was causing the crush, because in Windows Service it didn't exist and the new one couldn't be created and that was neccessary to run it correctly.
What's more it just showed me that this question couldn't be answered properly, cause the data I've provided was not enough and it was delicate.
Cheers:)

C# program parameters from the command line?

I'm trying to start a C# program running, and then give it command from the cmd.exe after it's started running. For instance, suppose I started my .exe from the command line (C://FILEPATH/my_program.exe). I'd then like to have that program continue running, and then have me be able to pass commands to it that it is capable of handling. In my ideal world this would be something like "C://FILEPATH/my_program.exe run_my_command()" which would execute the run_my_command function, or "C://FILEPATH/my_program.exe k", which would do something in response to the char k that I'd pre-programmed in. I know that, as I've typed, would start a new copy of my_program.exe. I'd only like to have one running while I pass something like that in.
Does anyone know how to do this? Sample code would be wonderfully appreciated. Thanks!!

The simplest solution would be for your second instance of "my_program.exe" to look for an existing instance that's already running, "pass" the message over to it and then exit immediately.
The usual way this is implemented is via named pipes (System.IO.Pipes in .NET 3.5+). When your program starts up, listen on a named pipe with a given name. If there's something else already listening on that pipe, send the message to it and exit.

You are describing a typical service and command tool. The service (demon) runs in the background and executes commands. The command tool takes user commands and passes them to the service. See Windows Service Applications. Having a service instead of starting several processes takes care of some issues your approach has, like security isolation between the processes (eg. one user starts the a command, another user starts another command and gets executed in the context of the first user) and process lifetime issues (user launches a command and then closes his session).
The command tool would communicate with the process via classic IPC (local RPC, pipes, shared memory, etc).

Set service dependencies after install

I have an application that runs as a Windows service. It stores various things settings in a database that are looked up when the service starts. I built the service to support various types of databases (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, etc). Often times end users choose to configure the software to use SQL Server (they can simply modify a config file with the connection string and restart the service). The problem is that when their machine boots up, often times SQL Server is started after my service so my service errors out on start up because it can't connect to the database. I know that I can specify dependencies for my service to help guide the Windows service manager to start the appropriate services before mine. However, I don't know what services to depend upon at install time (when my service is registered) since the user can change databases later on.
So my question is: is there a way for the user to manually indicate the service dependencies based on the database that they are using? If not, what is the proper design approach that I should be taking? I've thought about trying to do something like wait 30 seconds after my service starts up before connecting to the database but this seems really flaky for various reasons. I've also considered trying to "lazily" connect to the database; the problem is that I need a connection immediately upon start up since the database contains various pieces of vital info that my service needs when it first starts. Any ideas?

Dennis
what your looking for is SC.exe. This is a command line tool that users can use to configure services.
sc [Servername] Command Servicename [Optionname= Optionvalue...]
more specificly you would want to use
sc [ServerName] config ServiceName depend=servicetoDependOn
Here is a link on the commandlike options for SC.EXE
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810435.aspx

A possible (far from ideal) code solution:
In you startup method code it as a loop that terminates when you've got a connection. Then in that loop trap any database connection errors and keep retrying as the following pseudo code illustrates:
bool connected = false;
while (!connected)
{
try
{
connected = openDatabase(...);
}
catch (connection error)
{
// It might be worth waiting for some time here
}
}
This means that your program doesn't continue until it has a connection. However, it could also mean that your program never gets out of this loop, so you'd need some way of terminating it - either manually or after a certain number of tries.
As you need your service to start in a reasonable time, this code can't go in the main initialisation. You have to arrange for your program to "start" successfully, but not do any processing until this method had returned connected = true. You might achieve this by putting this code in a thread and then starting your actual application code on the "thread completed" event.

Not a direct answer put some points you can look into
Windows service can be started Automatically with a delay. You can check this question in SO for some information about it.
How to make Windows Service start as “Automatic (Delayed Start)”
Check this post How to: Code Service Dependencies

Activator.CreateInstance fails in Windows Service

I have an issue with a Windows Service which throws a NullReference exception whenever I try to use
var myType = Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(MyType))
There is no problem whenever I run the exact same code in a console window - and after debugging the obvious "which user is running this code" I doubt that it is a mere fact of changing the user running the service as I've tried to run the service using the computer's Administrator account as well as LocalSystem. I'm suspecting a Windows Update fiddling with default user rights but that's a bit of a desperate guess I feel.
Remember: The type and assembly exist and works fine - otherwise I wouldn't be able to run the code in a console window. It is only when running in the context of a Windows Service I get an error.
The question is: Can I in any way impersonate i.e. LocalSystem in a unittest by creating a GenericPrincipal (how would that GenericPrincipal look)?

You could always run a visual studio instance as LocalSystem. From the command line, enter the following:
at <time in near future> /interactive <path to devenv.exe>
Then wait for that time to roll around and VS should open up, but will be running under the LocalSystem account.
I'd personally not suspect the user account, and instead suspect that it's something to do with being interactive - does the constructor or class constructor for MyType have some implicit dependency on the desktop?
(Edit - oops, should be time before /interactive, corrected command line).
e.g.
at 11:48 /interactive "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe"

I know its a simple answer but have you tried putting it in a try catch block then writing out the exception to see if it is Permission based or otherwise.