Creating a .NET Windows Service

Visual C# Tutorials

.NET Framework Tutorials

Create .NET Windows Service Windows Service Basics The Timer Approach Comparing the Options Conclusion

© 2005 Pearson Education, Inc.

This article—Creating a .NET Windows Service—is from Enterprise Services with the .NET Framework: Developing Distributed Business Solutions with .NET Enterprise Services, by Christian Nagel. Copyright © 2005 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. This article has been edited especially for C# Online.NET.

Creating a .NET Windows Service: Three Different Approaches

The article details three different approaches to creating a .NET service. Most common is the timer-based service, which simply relies on a timer to invoke the background thread periodically. I also cover two other alternatives: using a single worker thread and using multiple worker threads. While the timer strategy is the simplest, the approaches using a single worker thread and multiple worker threads (specifically the multithreaded approach) offer some advantages.