Keeping a service alive

[Jeff Johnson]

I guess simply waiting on an asynchronous Receive from a message queue is
not enough to keep a Windows service alive? I've written a service whose
only purpose is to process a message queue. The OnStart method looks like
this:

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
// TODO: Add code here to start your service.
_executionQueue = new
MessageQueue(Properties.Settings.Default.ExecutionQueuePath);
_executionQueue.ReceiveCompleted += new
ReceiveCompletedEventHandler(ReceiveCompletedHandler);
_executionQueue.BeginReceive();
}

I thought this would start a thread to wait on the I/O event and this would
keep the service going, but as soon as I start the service I get the error
telling me it started and then stopped ("no work to do" etc.). Should I
throw in a dummy timer? That seems like a waste of resources to me. Also, a
newsgroup search turned up a suggestion to run everything from a class and
in a "while (_keepRunningFlag) { ... }" loop. Ideas?

 

[Jeff Johnson]

I guess simply waiting on an asynchronous Receive from a message queue is
not enough to keep a Windows service alive?

Never mind. I had an exception at startup because the account I was running
the service under didn't have permission to read the queue. Everything's
working fine now.

 

[Guest]

Glad you got it figured out. As for the other issue ... how to keep the
thread going without "spinning" try a AutoResetEvent object. It's a better
way to hold open other threads, and shut them down when desired, without
spinning.