Creating Windows Services

Creating a windows service in .net turns out to be a really simple thing. Instead of me doing a write up on it i will give you a like to a walkthrough on msdn and you can check it out.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zt39148a(v=vs.80).aspx

But what i will say is that i wanted to be able to edit the service configuration once it was started through a desktop interface. This was accomplished by saving the data to the registry and letting the service get its configuration from there. My Service itself runs a timer and checks periodically for new settings from the registry. I played around with a thread in a wait state but this took up too much cpu. A timer works very well with very consistent results.

The desktop app that was created to modify the settings was a simple .net app and it basically just formats data and modifies the appropriate registry values. here is a small snippet of getting and adding data to the registry.

Getting Data

        Dim regKey As RegistryKey
        regKey = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("Software\PPSPlus\MigrationApp\Data", False)
        If regKey Is Nothing Then
            Registry.LocalMachine.CreateSubKey("Software\PPSPlus\MigrationApp\Data")
            regKey = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("Software\PPSPlus\MigrationApp\Data", False)
        End If
        Dim lr As String = regKey.GetValue("LastRun", "")
        Dim db As String = regKey.GetValue("Debug", "")
        Dim pk As String = regKey.GetValue("PPSImportKey", "")
        RegImportData = regKey.GetValue("ImportData", "")
        RegImportType = regKey.GetValue("ImportType", "")
        Dim df As String = regKey.GetValue("ForceRun", "")

Adding Data .

      Dim regKey As RegistryKey
        regKey = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("Software\PPSPlus\MigrationApp\Data", True)

        regKey.SetValue("LastRun", DateTimePicker1.Value.ToString)
        regKey.SetValue("Debug", ComboBox1.SelectedItem.ToString)
        regKey.SetValue("PPSImportKey", TextBox3.Text)
        regKey.SetValue("ImportData", TextBox4.Text)
        regKey.SetValue("ImportType", ComboBox2.SelectedItem.ToString)
        regKey.SetValue("ForceRun", ComboBox3.Text)

And that’s all he wrote.