What is the accepted pattern for an application that can be run as a service or as a console application

Question

I have a project that is deployed to production as a windows service. However for local development purposes it would be useful to run it as a console application. At the moment

Answer 1

I have done this before by implementing a normal Windows Service (by deriving from ServiceBase), but putting a check in the main method to check for a command line argument.

If the args contain /console, start the console version, otherwise start the service.

Something like this:

internal class MyService : ServiceBase
{
    internal static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        if (args.Length == 0)
        {
            // run as a service....
            ServiceBase[] servicesToRun = new ServiceBase[] {new MyService()};
            Run(servicesToRun);
        }
        else
        {
            // run as a console application....
        }
    }
}