Developer's Notes

It sounds like an easy task, but I have seen many times that people actually do some strange stuff, trying to run a .NET project containing Windows service from debugger. So decided I'll write a small note on how do I do that.

If you create a project for Windows service, using wizard in Visual Studio, try to execute it straight from debugger. You'll get that service cannot start or something similar. I do a small trick by checking if debugger is attached and calling some sort of Start method in such case, or executing code created by wizard otherwise. See example below :

   1: [DllImport("Kernel32.dll")]

   2: private static extern bool AllocConsole();

   3:  

   4: static void Main()

   5: {

   6:     MyService service = new MyService();

   7:  

   8:     if (!System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)

   9:     {

  10:         ServiceBase.Run(service);

  11:     }

  12:     else

  13:     {

  14:         //open console

  15:         AllocConsole();

  16:  

  17:         service.Start();

  18:         Console.WriteLine("Press ENTER to exit...");

  19:         Console.ReadLine();

  20:         service.Stop();

  21:     }

  22: }

There is a small addition I usually do - open a console window (you can get the similar effect by setting project's output type to Console Application, but I just prefer it this way). The Win32 API method AllocConsole will create a console window if it doesn't exist yet, so you can actually write to and read from it as usual.

Cheers.