Windows Service Container

Question

For my projects I need quite often to create windows services.

I need them for scheduling operations, file system watching, asynchronous or long running side tasks (backup files, sending messages, check incoming mail to process, notifications etc).

I also use them to expose WCF services that are cross applications in the enterprise.

The self hosted scenario seems to me more appropriate as we are still on II6 that is quite limited (only http) for exposing WCF.

Most of) the services need also to expose some kind of administration interface (web or desktop) for reporting, starting and stopping the various services etc.

Seems strange to me that a "host container" that leverages most of these features (host, install new services, remote ui for admin, exposing wcf, scheduling etc) with some kind of mef plugins doesn't already exists.

What are the options if I do not want to start from scratch?

Answer 1

There is one host server in development (Microsoft) - codename Dublin.

The possible option would be to create one Windows Service - host application, which will load all of your WCF services and create ServiceHost for each of them (for instance, through reflection). Having only one windows service would make it easy to administer all service hosts (you wouldn't have to administer windows service, but only in-process hosts).

Answer 2

Hi! I am a developer for an open source windows service hosting framework called Daemoniq. I understand how installers can be an inconvenience so creating installers on the fly is one of its features. You can download it from http://daemoniq.org

Current features include:

• container agnostic service location via the CommonServiceLocator
• set common service properties like serviceName, displayName, description and serviceStartMode via app.config
• run multiple windows services on the same process
• set recovery options via app.config
• set services depended on via app.config
• set service process credentials via command-line
• install, uninstall, debug services via command-line

Please feel free to have a look at it. Code contributions are also welcome =D

Thanks!