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