How can I run a Windows GUI application on as a service?

Question

I have an existing GUI application that should have been implemented as a service. Basically, I need to be able to remotely log onto and off of the Windows 2003 server and s

Answer 1

I've had good experience with winsw. I was able to convert quite easily my batch files to services using it.

I've used it for nginx as well, per this answer.

Answer 2

You can wrap it up into srvany, though you may need to assign it an actual user account (as opposed to LocalService or some such)

Answer 3

Windows services cannot have GUIs, so you will need to either get rid of the GUI or separate your application into two pieces - a service with no UI, and a "controller" application. If you have the source code, converting the non-GUI code into a service is easy - Visual Studio has a 'Windows Service' project type that takes care of the wrapping for you, and there is a simple walkthrough that shows you how to create a deployment project that will take care of installation.

If you opt for the second route and need to put some of the original GUI code into a controller, the controller and service can communicate via WCF, .NET Remoting or plain socket connections with a protocol you define yourself. If you use Remoting, be sure to use a "chunky" interface that transfers data with as few method invocations as possible - each call has a fair amount of overhead.

If the UI is fairly simple, you may be able to get away with using configuration files for input and log files or the Windows Event Log for output.

Answer 4

Do you have the source? In many cases the difference between a stand alone application and a service are minimal.

Most of the changes are related to hooking the code into the service manager properly. Once done, you'll know that any problems that occur are a result of your programming and not any other program.

Answer 5

First I would have to ask why your service needs a user interface. Most likely it does not but you probably need a client that gets data from this service. The reason services don't usually have GUI's is they may not have a window environment to run in. Services can start and run without a user logged in to the machine. In this case there would be no desktop for the service GUI to run in.

Having said that you can set properties on the service to run as a user as suggested by Mark. You can also specify in the properties of the service to "Allow service to interact with desktop". Only do this if you know a user will be logged in.

Answer 6

Has anyone used a third party product like: Always Up?

Seems to do what I need. It's the capability to keep running through login / logout cycles I need. And the capability to ignore that it's a GUI app and run it anyway.

They must be linking into the exe manually and calling WinMain or something.