Write log messages in your code. View the system log. Work with breakpoints. View and configure breakpoints. Inspect variables. Add watchpoints. View and change resource value display format. InstallUtil is located in the. How to debug Windows services Use the process ID of the process that hosts the service that you want to debug.
Use the image name of the process that hosts the service that you want to debug. Start the WinDbg debugger and attach to the process that hosts the service that you want to debug. The UserInteractive property reports false for a Windows process or a service like IIS that runs without a user interface. If this property is false , do not display modal dialogs or message boxes because there is no graphical user interface for the user to interact with. Type c:windowsmicrosoft.
After installing the Windows service , start it. You may not have permissions to attach to the service. In the Available processes list, find and select the process or processes you want to attach to.
Best way to have a Windows service restart itself is to set up two things: 1 Go to Services and look at the properties of your installed service. So a Windows service can create them on-the-fly, restart , and then use them.
The ServiceController is the component of the system that controls starting, pausing, stopping, and continuing services in the system. It also starts and stops loads and unloads services except device drivers. This class available in System. The proper way to check if a service is running is to simply ask it.
Put the actual code already available in the Main method between else and endif. Finally our code looks as in the following:.
Notice that I have set the Thread. Sleep method to double the time of the timer interval so that it executes only once and then the application is stopped. If you want the code to run in an infinite time period then modify the time from Thread. Sleep to Thread. Sleep Timeout. Infinite ; Now let us see how our code runs. Make sure that you set the application running mode as "Debug".
Figure 5: Debug mode Press F5. It should open a Notepad file and then it should be done. For convenience I have added variables in custom method and elapsed method to check the timestamps while debugging. Note: Since I am taking screenshots, the timer may have stopped until I go to the next line and so the timestamps must be approximate. That is we are now not getting the alert when we run. So, it is working like an exe file in debugging mode and works like a service in release mode. This is very convenient and somewhat relaxing in the programmer's life.
For example, they must return void and cannot contain out parameters, hence the somewhat verbose method definition. However, this approach does have benefits over the compiler pragmas since you can always verify that your code is currently compiling regardless of what your selected solution configuration is e. A slight variation on the previous approaches is to check if the current process is running in user interactive mode , rather than relying on compiler constants. The UserInteractive property will return false when a process is running within a host that does not allow user interface components to be displayed.
Please note, however, that this approach may not be desirable if you do not want your application to be runnable in production outside the context of the Service Control Manager.
This can be beneficial when you are nearing the end of development work on your project and you want to test that your application is operating correctly when it is running as a bonafide Windows Service. It is also useful if you are experiencing issues in production that can only be reproduced when your Windows Service is running within the context of the Service Control Manager. The debugger should now be attached to the process and your breakpoints should be hit as they normally would.
In summary, I have explained how Windows Services are hosted by the Service Control Manager, making them less straightforward to debug compared to standard Windows and Console applications. I have covered how to install Windows Services using either the InstallUtil or sc utilities.
Lastly, I have demonstrated a few different ways in which you can add support for debugging Windows Services from Visual Studio. Yes, add me to your mailing list. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Home Blog About Contact. How to debug a. Windows Service basics To start with, it is important to understand how Windows Services operate in regards to hosting.
Service registration When developing a Windows Service using C , as per most. If seems like a lot of work but it has always worked and makes debugging the code very very easy. You can have all sorts of output added to the form so you can watch it run. March 4, c Leave a comment. If there is a new record, I then want the script to store the entries from two sp What I am trying to achieve is when clicking on the button it should open a URL in a n Add menu.
How to debug the. One thing you could do as a temporary workaround is to launch the debugger as the first line of code in the OnStart System. Right click on the service name in Windows Service Manager. Select "Properties". Now, when you start the service, it will fire up Visual Studio and break on the line below. It works just fine! The options above did not appear to work on Windows 8.
You can add a line of code like this: System. Break which will bring up a window prompting you to choose which debugger to use to debug, e.
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