Easier way to debug a Windows service

Question

Is there an easier way to step through the code than to start the service through the Windows Service Control Manager and then attaching the debugger to the thread? It\'s ki

Answer 1

UPDATE

This approach is by far the easiest:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/DebugWinServices.aspx

I leave my original answer below for posterity.

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My services tend to have a class that encapsulates a Timer as I want the service to check at regular intervals whether there is any work for it to do.

We new up the class and call StartEventLoop() during the service start-up. (This class could easily be used from a console app too.)

The nice side-effect of this design is that the arguments with which you set up the Timer can be used to have a delay before the service actually starts working, so that you have time to attach a debugger manually.

p.s. How to attach the debugger manually to a running process...?

using System;
using System.Threading;
using System.Configuration;    

public class ServiceEventHandler
{
    Timer _timer;
    public ServiceEventHandler()
    {
        // get configuration etc.
        _timer = new Timer(
            new TimerCallback(EventTimerCallback)
            , null
            , Timeout.Infinite
            , Timeout.Infinite);
    }

    private void EventTimerCallback(object state)
    {
        // do something
    }

    public void StartEventLoop()
    {
        // wait a minute, then run every 30 minutes
        _timer.Change(TimeSpan.Parse("00:01:00"), TimeSpan.Parse("00:30:00");
    }
}

Also I used to do the following (already mentioned in previous answers but with the conditional compiler [#if] flags to help avoid it firing in a Release build).

I stopped doing it this way because sometimes we'd forget to build in Release and have a debugger break in an app running on a client demo (embarrasing!).

#if DEBUG
if (!System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
{
    System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
}
#endif