Summary

This chapter covered some of the trials and tribulations that are a part of debugging Windows services and DLLs that load into services. Services have a special status in the operating system, and because of the security issues involved, you need to have an excellent understanding of what services are and how they behave. Service debugging takes more planning up front than most debugging.

The first step in debugging services and any DLLs that load into services is to debug as much of the core code as possible while running as a normal application. The second step is to ensure that you take advantage of the environment for services, such as by turning on interaction with the desktop and by using tools such as Process Explorer to find the information you need to debug faster.