Custom Service stop

Darryl Hoar 181

I am using visual studio professional 2019 and c#.
I have created a service project, using the template in visual studio.

When this service starts, it validates several things. What I need to do is
abort the OnStart if certain validations fail. For instance, if the Com port specified
in the app.config file is invalid.

How do I do this? I can't call OnStop from within OnStart, so....

Any help greatly appreciated.

Viorel 117.6K Reputation points

2022-10-22T05:18:44.18+00:00

Did you try calling Stop( )?
Darryl Hoar 181 Reputation points

2022-10-24T12:09:46.127+00:00

I do not think you can call Stop() within the OnStart function.
RLWA32 45,571 Reputation points

2022-10-24T13:09:22.107+00:00

Does the service use a worker thread to perform the actual processing so that it can return from OnStart in a timely manner?
Viorel 117.6K Reputation points

2022-10-24T14:37:07.257+00:00

Maybe I will check it sometime.
RLWA32 45,571 Reputation points

2022-10-24T14:43:43.237+00:00

In my quick and dirty test an error was logged for the service when Stop() was called from within OnStart().

Checking for resource availability in OnStart(), allowing the service to start, and then spinning up a thread to call Stop() (instead of a thread to do the service's tasks) worked to stop the service gracefully without generating an error.
Darryl Hoar 181 Reputation points

2022-10-24T14:47:55.76+00:00

The service starts (2) threads.
RLWA32 45,571 Reputation points

2022-10-24T14:59:53.327+00:00

So use a thread to call.Stop() if resources are unavailable instead of starting these two threads.

1 answer

P a u l 10,731 Reputation points

2022-10-21T21:52:24.353+00:00

You could just throw an exception in the OnStart method and that will cause the service not to start.

If you want the app to report failures then you can open your service in design view & in the properties panel set the AutoLog property to true, then thrown exceptions will end up in your Windows Event Log:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.serviceprocess.servicebase.autolog?view=dotnet-plat-ext-7.0
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