An Easier Way to Debug Windows Services

Are you tired of attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the service application? I got the solution just for you! It’s a small helper class containing a static method which you need to invoke.

public static void Main(string[] argv)
{
    // just include this check, "Service1" is the name of your service class.
    if (WindowsServiceHelper.RunAsConsoleIfRequested<Service1>())
        return;

    // all other code
}

Then go to project properties, the “Debug” tab and add “-console” as Command Arguments.

That’s it! What I do is simply allocate a console using the winapi and then invoke (through reflection) the proper protected methods in your service class.

The source code for the helper class is as follows:

public static class WindowsServiceHelper
{
    [DllImport("kernel32")]
    static extern bool AllocConsole();

    public static bool RunAsConsoleIfRequested<t>() where T : ServiceBase, new()
    {
        if (!Environment.CommandLine.Contains("-console"))
            return false;

        var args = Environment.GetCommandLineArgs().Where
			(name => name != "-console").ToArray();

        AllocConsole();

        var service = new T();
        var onstart = service.GetType().GetMethod("OnStart", 
		BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic);
        onstart.Invoke(service, new object[] {args});

        Console.WriteLine("Your service named '" + service.GetType().FullName + 
			"' is up and running.\r\nPress 'ENTER' to stop it.");
        Console.ReadLine();

        var onstop = service.GetType().GetMethod("OnStop", 
		BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic);
        onstop.Invoke(service, null);
        return true;
    }
}