Installing and debugging a .NET service built in Visual Studio 2008

There seem to be several tutorials on the web on how to create a Windows service using .NET in Visual Studio 2005 and before but I was unable to find one for Visual Studio 2008, so thought I’d write my own since I got tripped up a couple of times when I tried to install it.

The first step is easy, create a new project using New Project/Windows Service. The next obvious thing to try and do is to build it and run it. You will then be presented with the following error -

Cannot start service from the command line or a debugger.  A Windows Service must first be installed (using installutil.exe) and then started with the ServerExplorer, Windows Services Administrative tool or the NET START command.

So then you fire up installutil from the command line passing the EXE’s full path as the only parameter. If you make my schoolboy error, you’ll be faced with the following error message -

Exception occurred while initializing the installation: System.BadImageFormatException: The format of the file 'WindowsService1.exe' is invalid.

This is because I ran installutil from the standard command prompt, rather than the .NET command prompt and it picked up installutil from the .NET Framework 1.1. So when I figured that out I ran the correct version of installutil and got the following error message -

No public installers with the RunInstallerAttribute.Yes attribute could be found in the C:\Source\dotNET2\WindowsService1\WindowsService1\bin\Debug\WindowsService1.exe assembly.

So the next thing to do is to add an installer to the service. This is achieved by right clicking on the service’s design surface and selecting ‘Add Installer’. after doing this and running installutil once again, the service should appear in the Services applet.

Finally, to debug it you’ll need to start it from the Services applet and then use the ‘Debug/Attach to Process…’ menu item in Visual Studio, making sure the ‘Show processes in all sessions’ checkbox is checked if the service is running under a different account to your own.