You’ve written your service and now you want to install it but you’re having problems. Well have no fear, because I wasted valuable hours of my life re-figuring this out last night and will tell you everything you need to know.

Most instructions on the web simply tell you to run installutil against your executable. This sounds easy enough but has a couple of problems:

1. Running installutil from a cmd window doesn’t work. 
2. Once you run it, your windows service may or may not be properly configured for installutil.

To solve the first problem, run the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt which is located under Visual Studio 2008 in Start->All Programs.  To solve the second, you have to add an installer class to your service. (This is different from creating a deployment package.)  To add an installer class, follow these steps:

1. Go to the designer view of your main class. (Probably service1.cs if you didn’t rename it.)
    
2. Right click in the gray area of the designer and click Add Installer.
    
3. This will create a file called ProjectInstaller.cs and take you to the designer view of this file where you should see:
   
4. Click on serviceProcessInstaller1 and in the properties pane, change Account to LocalSystem.
5. Click on serviceInstaller1 and change Description, DisplayName and ServiceName to something descriptive. 
6. Change StartType to whatever you service needs. (Manual, Disabled, or Automatic)

Now, simply install the service. From the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt run:

installutil "Whatever Your Executable Is Named.exe"

If it is successful you should see a message like:

The transacted install has completed.

That’s all there is to it.

For the most part, writing a windows service in Visual Studio.net is only marginally different than writing a windows application.  You may have difficulty attempting to implement some components you’ve learned to rely on. One such component is the timer.

In a windows application, you simply drag a Timer from the Toolbox and implement as normal.  Curiously, you can do the same in a service–it just doesn’t work.  This is because the timer in the toolbox is located in System.Windows.Forms. So how do you do it? It’s really quite simple.

First, add the following line to the top of your Windows Service project:

using System.Timers;

Next, add this line to top of your class (the section starting with public partial class..)

Timer timer1= new Timer();

Obviously you may want to pick a more descriptive name…just be consistent. Next we need to create the method that will fire each time the timer reaches 0.  

private void timer1_Elapsed(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
      //Some awesome code!
}

Lastly, we need to bind this method to the timer’s elapsed event and finish implementing the timer.  Find your service’s OnStart() method and add something like:

timer1.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(timer1_Elapsed);
timer1.Interval = 5000;
timer1.Enabled = true;
timer1.Start();

The first line above tells the service to run timer1_Elapsed everytime the timer1.Elapsed event is raised. The second line sets the timer1′s interval to 5 seconds (1000 milliseconds = 1 second).  Lastly we enable the timer and start it.

You may want to add this to your OnStop() method for completeness:

timer1.Enabled = false;

That’s all there is to it.  This should be all you need to know to implement a timer in your service.