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I am often asked the question “Can’t I just RUN my Windows Service without installing and starting it?”.

My answer usually is “No, you can’t but…”

There is a “but”: you can create your Windows service as a hybrid application, so it will run as a console application also.

Why would you want to do that?

• It makes debugging from within Visual Studio a breeze
• Sometimes you want to show some debugging information in a production environment by using Console.WriteLine()
• You don’t always want to install your service to see if it runs in a particular environment

Turning a .NET Windows service into a hybrid application is actually very simple. In your Main() method you add the following:

static class Program{  static void Main(params string[] parameters)  {    if (parameters.Length > 0 && parameters[0].ToLower() == "/console")      new MyService().RunConsole(parameters);    else
      ServiceBase.Run(new ServiceBase[] { new MyService() });   }}

Then, in your service class, add a RunConsole() method:

   public void RunConsole(string[] args)   {      OnStart(args);

      Console.WriteLine("Service running... Press any key to stop");

      Console.Read();

      OnStop();   }

That’s all there is to it. To run your service as a console app, just specify “/console” as the first paramter when running the .EXE.

UPDATE: all of this, and more is now all wrapped in a .NET library (open-source) named Vici WinService.

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This weblog is sponsored by The Vici Project.

I
just added support for SQLite 3 to CoolStorage.NET (my object mapping
library). I used the open source System.Data.SQLite ADO.NET provider
which seems a pretty solid product.

Adding support for this “lite” database was pretty straightforward.

The
only problem I had was with quoted identifiers: identifiers can be
quoted using double quotes, but they behave a bit strange. For example,
if you want to quote the identifiers in this query:

SELECT c.CustomerID, c.Name from tblCustomer c

you would write:

SELECT “c.CustomerID”, “c.Name” from “tblCustomer” c

This doesn’t work. You get the following result set:

c.CustomerID	c.Name
c.CustomerID	c.Name
c.CustomerID	c.Name
c.CustomerID	c.Name
c.CustomerID	c.Name

To fix this, you need to change it to this:

SELECT “c”.”CustomerID”, “c”.”Name” from “tblCustomer” c

Other than that, I’m pretty impressed (so far)

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This weblog is sponsored by The Vici Project.