What is the cleanest, most reliable way to run a Windows application as a service without touching its code?
Use case: NorthScale's 64-bit Windows version of memcached runs as a generic application. I'd like to stick it into a Windows 2003 or 2008 Service so I can start/stop/restart/etc it through the standard interface.
If you can't modify the app there are a bunch of 'run as service' wrappers.
I have used cygrunsrv.exe, I think it works with non-cygwin executables.
Well, given this is Stackoverflow, not serverfault or superuser, I'm going with a programming related answer:
If you can't change the code then you cannot directly run the app as a service. However it should not be difficult to Make a Win32 service - it all revolves around calling one api: StartServiceCtrlDispatcher. In response to commands from the service control manager your wrapper service would CreateProcess etc. on the memcached application.
The Windows Resource Kit has any executable, srvany.exe that can be used, as described here, to run basically any exe as a service. The setup is a little convoluted (requires a registry edit), but should work for most things that can be run as a user applicaiton.