Signalling Initialization Failure from Service.OnStart

We have a case where during Service startup (OnStart), a worker thread is started. The worker thread connects to a SQL database. If the database is unavailable, the worker thread can signal the main thread of the failure. The question is; How to signal the Service Control Manager that startup has failed.

From stackoverflow

• This is how we handled this situation. This code was added to our main service class and then at the point where we wanted to return startup as failed, made a call to SetServiceFail(1065) followed by a return from OnStart. In this case 1065 returns a database does not exist status.

  I would also note that in SetServiceFail I hard-coded the serviceType since in our case all of our services are stand-alone so I kept it simple.

  private void SetServiceFail (int ErrorCode)
  {
       SERVICE_STATUS _ServiceStatus = new SERVICE_STATUS ();
       _ServiceStatus.currentState = (int) State.SERVICE_STOPPED;
       _ServiceStatus.serviceType = 16; //SERVICE_WIN32_OWN_PROCESS
       _ServiceStatus.waitHint = 0;
       _ServiceStatus.win32ExitCode = ErrorCode;
       _ServiceStatus.serviceSpecificExitCode = 0;
       _ServiceStatus.checkPoint = 0;
       _ServiceStatus.controlsAccepted = 0 |
             (this.CanStop ? (int) ControlsAccepted.ACCEPT_STOP : 0) |
             (this.CanShutdown ? (int) ControlsAccepted.ACCEPT_SHUTDOWN : 0) |
             (this.CanPauseAndContinue ? (int) ControlsAccepted.ACCEPT_PAUSE_CONTINUE : 0) |
             (this.CanHandleSessionChangeEvent ? (int) ControlsAccepted.ACCEPT_SESSION_CHANGE : 0) |
             (this.CanHandlePowerEvent ? (int) ControlsAccepted.ACCEPT_POWER_EVENT : 0);
       SetServiceStatus (this.ServiceHandle, ref _ServiceStatus);
  }
  
  public enum State
  {
       SERVICE_STOPPED = 1,
       SERVICE_START_PENDING = 2,
       SERVICE_STOP_PENDING = 3,
       SERVICE_RUNNING = 4,
       SERVICE_CONTINUE_PENDING = 5,
       SERVICE_PAUSE_PENDING = 6,
       SERVICE_PAUSED = 7
  }
  
  public enum ControlsAccepted
  {
       ACCEPT_STOP = 1,
       ACCEPT_PAUSE_CONTINUE = 2,
       ACCEPT_SHUTDOWN = 4,
       ACCEPT_POWER_EVENT = 64,
       ACCEPT_SESSION_CHANGE = 128
  }
  
  [StructLayout (LayoutKind.Sequential)]
  private struct SERVICE_STATUS
  {
       public int serviceType;
       public int currentState;
       public int controlsAccepted;
       public int win32ExitCode;
       public int serviceSpecificExitCode;
       public int checkPoint;
       public int waitHint;
  }
  
  [DllImport ("advapi32.dll")]
  private static extern bool SetServiceStatus (IntPtr hServiceStatus, ref SERVICE_STATUS lpServiceStatus);
  

• One way to stop it is to use the ServiceController, but you wont get any fancy message in the service control manager about an error or a failure to start.

  
  var controller = new System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController("NameOfYourService");
  controller.Stop();
  

• http://www.boyet.com/Articles/dotNETServicesOnStart.html