A service project created in Visual Studio cannot be directly started in the debugger. A small tweak enables direct running of the service and gets rid of the need to deploy the service to test it.
From the first time I tried developing a Windows Service in C++ back in the good old days before .NET I’ve always found them awkward to debug. When developing I want to have my environment setup with multiple startup projects so that I can open a solution, hit F5 and have everything required running. If the solution contains a service a tedious compile-install-start service-attach debugger procedure is required.
Last week when I created a service I decided to find a better way, a way that enables the simple “press F5 to get everything running” approach. Since a service project already compiles to an .exe file, it can be changed to check if it is run as a service or interactively during startup. If running interactively, a reflection hack is used to call each service’s OnStart method.
