SimpleServices

#Intro

A base class for self-installing Windows Services with debugging hooks to run as console apps without requiring InstallUtil This allows you to build Windows services that also can be F5 run / debugged straight from Visual Studio with minimal effort.

SimpleServices allows you to manually control service installation from code, rather than awkward designer files that do code-gen.

Support for IoC Containers
Support for manipulation of installation in code
Creates auto-installing services (no SVCUTIL required!)
Support for logging frameworks
Built in App cache concurrent dictionary to share state between isolated hosted IWindowsServices.

Getting started

Simple services requires you do two things:

Implement the interface IWindowsService on the entry point of your application logic class
Use it's bootstrapping code to initilise your app.

Example

If you had a console app that looked like this:

public static void Main_Original(string[] args)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Hello world!");
    Console.ReadLine();
    Console.WriteLine("Goodbye world!");
}

You would first need to extract out your login into a class that implemented IWindowsService. The interface looks like this:

public interface IWindowsService
{
    ApplicationContext AppContext { get; set; }
    void Start(string[] args);
    void Stop();
}

Once you did that, you'd have a class that looked like this:

class MyService  : IWindowsService
{
    public ApplicationContext AppContext { get; set; }

    public void Start(string[] args)
    {
        AppContext.Log("Hello world!");
    }

    public void Stop()
    {
        AppContext.Log("Goodbye world!");
    }
}

Which is now ready to run as either a console app or a windows service. Now, you'd want to replace your application startup code in Main with this:

[RunInstaller(true)]
public class Program : SimpleServiceApplication
{
    private static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        new Service(args,
                    new List<IWindowsService> { new MyService() }.ToArray,
                    installationSettings: (serviceInstaller, serviceProcessInstaller) =>
                    {
                        serviceInstaller.ServiceName = "SimpleServices.ExampleApplication";
                        serviceInstaller.StartType = ServiceStartMode.Manual;
                        serviceProcessInstaller.Account = ServiceAccount.LocalService;
                    },
                    configureContext: x => { x.Log = Console.WriteLine; })
            .Host();
    }
}

And when you press F5, your application will behave just as it did before.

But what do I get that's extra?

Now that you've started using SimpleServices, you can install your application as a Windows service by calling:

MyExeName.exe /i or MyExeName.exe /install

and you can uninstall by calling:

MyExeName.exe /u or MyExeName.exe /uninstall

Get it!

Pull / build this repository
From NuGe => PM> Install-Package simpleservices

davidwhitney/SimpleServices

SimpleServices

Getting started

Example

But what do I get that's extra?

Get it!