How to create Windows Services in C#

Hello everyone, in this article we are going to talk about how to create the windows service in C# language. We will make this example on Visual Studio and we are going to create a simple windows Service.

Let's get started.

Firstly What are the Windows Services

Services are small programmies which work at background without any output and any interface. We can use them to check a web service or check a file for being downloaded. We can create database areas for other programs and we can log the system resources etc. We can do anythig at background with these programmies which named as services.

Now let's create a service project with C# and Visual Studio.

You can see it at below image.

Now we are going to need two main methods. These methods are going to work when service started and stopped. These methods are override methods and make sure implemented them in the source.


protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
    
}

protected override void OnStop()
{
    
}

You can also implement the some other methods. These methods will work at the pause continue. The user may pause the service to do something and can make the service continued when things are done. So you are going to need the below methods to do this.


protected override void OnPause()
{
    
}

protected override void OnContinue()
{
    
}

Now let's make some logs with our service according to our system resource usages. This is why we created this service :))


private static Timer timer;
PerformanceCounter cpuCounter;
PerformanceCounter ramCounter;

StreamWriter write = File.AppendText( "D:\\ResLogs.txt" );

cpuCounter = new PerformanceCounter("Processor", "% Processor Time", "_Total");
ramCounter = new PerformanceCounter("Memory", "Available MBytes");

public string getCpuUsage()
{
       return cpuCounter.NextValue()+"%";
}

public string getRAM()
{
       return ramCounter.NextValue()+"MB";
} 

private static void StartTimer()
{
        // Create a timer with specified inerval. 
        timer = new System.Timers.Timer(60000);
        // Hook up the related event which perform the task
        timer.Elapsed += TimerEvent;
        timer.AutoReset = true;
        timer.Enabled = true;
}

private static void TimerEvent(Object source, ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
        write.WriteLine( "[" + DateTime.Now.ToString() + "] " + "CPU : " + getCpuUsage() + " / RAM : " + getRAM()  );
}

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
    StartTimer();
}

protected override void OnStop()
{
    timer.Enabled = false;
    write.Close();
}

Last thing which we have to do is adding an installer to our service project. To do this we need to switch to

design view screen

and right click on this screen Then click the Add Installer. Then at the properties screen we are going to set the configurations of this installer.

You can see the related screen at below image:

In properties screen we are going to see some important properties:

Delayed Auto Start It will set the service to start with some delay.
Description Description of the service
Display Name The name of the service at the services window at the operating system
Start Type We will select the service will start as Automatically or manually.

And now we are ready to build our service and installer. After creating the installer we just need to start the installer and it will be installed. You can see it at the services window at the opeationg system.

Below image you can see the output of the example and the services screen.

And the output of the service

That is all in this article.

Have a good service creating

Burak Hamdi TUFAN.

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Author

Burak Hamdi TUFAN

I am a software developer experienced 15 years and here to share all my programming experiences. I have worked on so many platforms and programming languages especially C, C#, C++ and Java. I am studing PhD at Kocaeli University on Aviation Technologies. I am building softwares and technologies on aviation.

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