Limitations to Standalone Services (Windows CE 5.0)
Running a service in standalone mode poses the following limitations:
- Interprocess communication mechanisms provided by Services.exe will not work with services that are loaded in standalone processes. An application cannot access a standalone service by calling CreateFile, GetServiceHandle or any of the other functions exposed by Services.exe. The service will not be listed when "services list" is run.
- A number of the services that are shipped with Windows CE cannot run in standalone mode. For example, Telnet server will not work as a standalone process because it relies on the instances of cmd.exe that it spawns to be able to use the ReadFile and WriteFile functions. Web server will not work as a standalone process because other services depend on running in the same memory space as the Web server.
- Windows CE is limited to 32 processes. Each standalone service consumes one of these processes. A standalone process also requires more resources than a service loaded in the non-standalone mode, because processes are much more memory-consuming than threads on Windows CE.
See Also
CreateFile | GetServiceHandle | ReadFile | WriteFile | Configuring Services.exe to Load a Standalone Service
Send Feedback on this topic to the authors