[dba-VB] A windows Service or Not a service?

Drew Wutka DWUTKA at Marlow.com
Thu Jun 16 17:08:46 CDT 2011


An NT Service (as you are calling it a Windows Service) is an executable
that is running on your machine and it has several different
'properties'.

First, the type of startup... either manual, disabled or automatic.
Automatic starts when you computer starts.  Disabled means the service
won't start.

Secondly, there is an 'interactive' option, that determines if a service
can run with an interface.  For this to work, it has to have user
credentials.

Services with a user interface can run into all sorts of issues. I
personally haven't built a service in .net yet, but have had lots of
experience with them in VB 6.

What you really want to do is build a service that has no interface, and
then build a program that 'controls' that program. This can be done in
many ways, either you can have the control change values in a database
or file, that the service utilizes, or you can create various 'talking'
methods, like named pipes, tcp/ip comms, etc, that allows the
controlling program to directly talk to the service.

Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Francisco
Tapia
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2011 10:58 AM
To: Discussion concerning Visual Basic and related programming issues.
Subject: [dba-VB] A windows Service or Not a service?

I wrote a simple application that has a form and two buttons (along with
a
timer).  My initial idea was that I would write this to be a windows
service
so it would auto-start whenever a specific server would reboot etc.  The
purpose is that I need to get new records created by a "Vendor"
application
and have them sent to a Second "Vendor" system.  I call a custom view
that I
wrote that collects that last set of changes, then record by record
calls a
webservice on our SAP system and pushes in the new changes.  My sql
server
version is Sql Server 2000 so it's not as easy as just writing a soap
object
to make the webservice call, I think it was much easier to just write
the
app in c# and make the call that way, which works.  NOW for the tricky
part.  I wanted to write up the app to create a windows service
installer so
that my admins could log into the windows server and either start or
stop
the application, I also wanted to provide a gui view to the windows
service
so that they could choose a different timer so it could run every 1
minute
(every 2 minutes, etc..) what ever they would choose.

after reading MS's description on windows service classes, I noticed
that
supposedly the .Net Studio does not support this, but I've seen other
apps
that DO provide a gui view to the windows service that they introduce.
so
my question to the group is, have you done this before? and if so how
did
you go about it?

--
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d56de412%28v=VS.90%29.aspx

The Windows service classes supported by the .NET Framework do not
support
interaction with interactive stations, that is, the logged-on user. The
.NET
Framework also does not include classes that represent stations and
desktops. If your Windows service must interact with other stations, you
will need to access the unmanaged Windows API. For more information, see
Window
Stations<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms687096%28v=VS.90%29.a
spx>and
Desktops<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682573%28v=VS.90%29.a
spx>in
the Platform SDK documentation.


-Francisco
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