Why Develop a Service?

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When designing your server application, you can implement it as a simple Windows executable in the same way you would implement any application. However, Windows supports a special type of application named a service. A service is a normal Windows executable application that contains additional infrastructure. This additional infrastructure allows the executable application to be controlled and monitored using the Service Control Manager (a component built into every machine running Windows).

The SCM allows an administrator to start, stop, pause, and continue a service executable locally or remotely. The SCM also monitors the service and can automatically restart it or reboot the machine if the service terminates unexpectedly. All server applications that ship with Windows are implemented as services. The MMC provides a Services snap-in that allows an administrator to control all the installed services by using a common interface.

For all these reasons, I strongly suggest that you include the additional infrastructure code in your application to turn it into a service. The details of how to do this are described in Chapter 3 of this book. The standard interface that allows you to control the SCM is described in Chapter 4.

NOTE

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To be eligible for the Microsoft BackOffice Logo program, your server application must be implemented as a Windows service.