Converting a Delphi application to run as a service - is it necessary?

Question

I have a delphi app that logs data from various places and writes the data to a file. The app has quite an extensive GUI to allow display of the data, configuration of the

Answer 1

In general is possible to have a mixed single exe which in turn runs as a service or runs as a full GUI standard application.

How much effort your application needs to fit this category is matter of how is it designed, specially in the kind of coupling it have between business logic and user interface logic.

One great example of this kind of application comes with Delphi itself: scktsrvr.exe in your $DELPHI\bin directory runs as a GUI application or as a service (run scktsrvr.exe /install to auto-register the service and use management console to start/stop it.

in folder $DELPHI\source\db you will find the project files (scktsrvr.dpr/res, ScktCnst.pas, ScktMain.pas/dfm). Take your time to inspect how is it done and, who knows... maybe this is what you're looking for your application.

Take in account since Windows Vista interactive services are not allowed to interact with the user at his/her desktop. An administrator have to enable the interactive services detection and the user have to change to session 0 desktop in order to interact with your service (by interact it means to see and interact with your service forms)