Help with creating a Windows Service (C#)

grahamor

Hi,

I need to make a windows service that checks a folder on the local system to see if there are any XML files in it. The check needs to be done every 15 minutes.

If there are files i loop through all the files in the folder and do what i need to do with them.

Should i use System.Threading.Sleep to perform the wait interval between checks ?

Also, does anyone know any good resources for creating windows services

Thanks

noonand

Hello,

Just going to give you enough to get you started here:

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
Thread xmlProcessingThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(ProcessXmlFiles));
xmlProcessingThread.Start();
}

private void ProcessXmlFiles()
{
while(true)
{

// Process your files here
// ...


// And at the end call this...
Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(15));
}
}

You may want to consider making the time interval configurable (i.e. in the app.config) - I'll leave this as an excercise to you.

There's no indentation to speak of as it looked awful in the text box window but I'm sure you'll figure it out. Also there may be minor syntactical errors here but the concept is sound. This code has not been tested and may sprout hairy things when compiled. Your kilometreage may vary, yada, yada.

ATB,
Derek

"It's all fun and games till someone loses an eye..."

noonand

grahamor wrote:

Also, does anyone know any good resources for creating windows services

Just spotted this - without being facetious - in Visual Studio 2005 choose File > New > Project

Assuming Visual C#, select the Windows category and pick 'Windows Service' from the right hand side.

That will set up a complete skeleton for you with all the stubs you need.

ATB,
Derek

"It's all fun and games till someone loses an eye..."

PixelTrawler

If you can get your hands on the exam book for MCPD 70-536
"MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation"
, there is a very useful chapter on creating a basic webservice, including building the installer file for setting it up. It also shows how to hook up the start, stop, pause actions for use in the services.msc console.

Check out Lesson8, Exercise3, Page 457