Windows Service Debug tedious

I'm building my first windows service... what an adventure.

To get me started I followed the following walktrough:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zt39148a.aspx#Y902

It's very well structured and it works!... Meaning that I get the In onStart and In onStop log messages on the created开发者_运维百科 Event Log.

Now, my question is this:

Every time I change the service code I need to rebuild the Setup Project, add the Service project as the Primary Project Output and reinstall the service.

This is quite tedious so I ask if there isn't a better way to test and debug the service.

Best Regards

Once your service is stopped, you should be able to update the binary simply by copying the new version over the old version.

Sometimes what I do if I just want to test some code in a windows service without needing it to run as a service I will modify the Main().

So instead of my Main being like this :

ServiceBase[] ServicesToRun;
ServicesToRun = new ServiceBase[] 
{ 
    new Service1() 
};
ServiceBase.Run( ServicesToRun );   

I modify it just to

Service1 service = new Service1();
service.Run();
// Put a breakpoint on the following line to always catch
// your service when it has finished its work
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(System.Threading.Timeout.Infinite);

And lets say that my OnStart method looks something like this:

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
 {
     // code to start your service.
     ThreadStart ts = new ThreadStart(Run);
     Thread t = new Thread(ts);
     t.Start();
}

So the Run() is just the method that your OnStart method starts.

Remember that this not a guarantee that your service will work correctly once installed as a service. But sometimes its useful to quick test some code.