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.
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posted @ Tuesday, September 18, 2007 6:43 PM