How to announce Windows Service Manager, that service fails (Recovery Options)

[Jan Lehmann]

Hello, the Windows Service Manager provides some recovery options. In the properties of a service, you can select the computer's response if the service fails. For example, First failure >> Restart the Service. How can I announce the Windows Service Manager, that my own service fails, so that the recovery options start the work? Has anyone a code example? Thanks in advance Best regards, Jan Lehmann [Germany]

[ian mariano]

If your service throws an unhandled exception, the SCM will handle it. If your service terminates abruptly (such as it's process being killed), the SCM will handle it.

//  c#
Process.GetCurrentProcess().Kill();

A really good way to get Windows to know your app failed most heinously is to use Interop and RaiseException and pass EXCEPTION_NONCONTINUABLE for the dwExceptionFlags parameter.

Ian Mariano - Bliki | Blog
"We are all wave equations in the information matrix of the universe" - me

[ian mariano]

It's also probably a very good idea to log the service failure in the Windows Event Log, or publish it to WMI.

//   c#  panic(), expects message as a string parameter
EventLog  log = new EventLog(...);

log.Write(message, EventLogEntryType.Error);
Process.GetCurrentProcess().Kill();

It should be noted that forcibly terminating an application without at least attempting a graceful shutdown / release of resources is a bad idea. If possible, cleanup what you can before Killing the process.

Ian Mariano - Bliki | Blog
"We are all wave equations in the information matrix of the universe" - me