How can a windows service programmatically restart itself?

Question

Set the service to restart after failure (double click the service in the control panel and have a look around on those tabs - I forget the name of it). Then, anytime you want the service to restart, just call Environment.Exit(1) (or any non-zero return) and the OS will restart it for you.

Dim proc As New Process()
Dim psi As New ProcessStartInfo()

psi.CreateNoWindow = True
psi.FileName = "cmd.exe"
psi.Arguments = "/C net stop YOURSERVICENAMEHERE && net start YOURSERVICENAMEHERE"
psi.LoadUserProfile = False
psi.UseShellExecute = False
psi.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden
proc.StartInfo = psi
proc.Start()

You can't be sure that the user account that your service is running under even has permissions to stop and restart the service.

const string strCmdText = "/C net stop \"SERVICENAME\"&net start \"SERVICENAME\"";
Process.Start("CMD.exe", strCmdText);

where SERVICENAME is the name of your service (double quotes included to account for spaces in the service name, can be omitted otherwise).

Clean, no auto-restart configuration necessary.

You can create a subprocess using Windows cmd.exe that restarts yourself:

 Process process = new Process();
 process.StartInfo.FileName = "cmd";
 process.StartInfo.Arguments = "/c net stop \"servicename\" & net start \"servicename\"";
 process.Start();

It would depend on why you want it to restart itself.

If you are just looking for a way to have the service clean itself out periodically then you could have a timer running in the service that periodically causes a purge routine.

If you are looking for a way to restart on failure - the service host itself can provide that ability when it is setup.

So why do you need to restart the server? What are you trying to achieve?

I don't think you can in a self-contained service (when you call Restart, it will stop the service, which will interrupt the Restart command, and it won't ever get started again). If you can add a second .exe (a Console app that uses the ServiceManager class), then you can kick off the standalone .exe and have it restart the service and then exit.

On second thought, you could probably have the service register a Scheduled Task (using the command-line 'at' command, for example) to start the service and then have it stop itself; that would probably work.