Yes. Read the Windows Installer SDK on http://msdn.microsoft.com/library[^]. Specifically, you can P/Invoke MsiInstallProduct given a path to the MSI package, along with the command-line specifying the property settings (if any). This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Software Design Engineer Developer Division Sustained Engineering Microsoft [My Articles] [My Blog]

Fot those interrested, Heath's hint returns a read-only reference to the registry key. Few bytes changed and it works: public override void Install(IDictionary stateSaver) { this.Description = "Blah blah."; base.Install(stateSaver); string p = @"SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\" + serviceInstaller1.ServiceName; RegistryKey key = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(p,true); { if (key != null) key.SetValue("Description", description); } } Ciao and thanks for your help Heath! Peter

Well... the performance gain is nothing. I didn't mentio it in my code posted, but inside the While loop there is a blocking call. This is exactly the same code in the single thread and new thread code. So that doesn't make any difference. I believe the CPU would go 100% if no blocking call was inside the loop and Thread.Sleep(0) was missing... Thanks Peter

The desired producer/consumer config is one-to-one. The scope of this application (which is part of a larger solution) is a single machine. We conceive several Windows Services that make up the machine solution. A first one uses sockets to listen for incoming connections and parses streams into atomic messages according to a protocol specification. A second service should handle decryption, a third inspection, and a fourth will be a router that forwards plain-text messages to several back-end machines. Messages always have a minumum length of 4 bytes length (mapped to an Int32), 4 bytes Transaction Number, 10 bytes of flag fields, and finally the message itself. So theoretically the max length of a message is 4+4+10=18 bytes of headers plus an Int32's MaxValue which would then be 2,147,483,665 bytes. In real life this will not be the case, messages will never exceed 150 bytes, including the header. The typical size will be around 50 bytes. There is also no need to queue messages within the mem mapped file mechanism as it is already covered with our own queueing mechanism which makes use of IO completion port threading in the background. Thanks, Peter