Starting a windows application from a windows service

Question

I am trying to start a windows application from a windows Service using the below code

Process.Start(@"filename.exe");

In windows 7 I receive a popup that says, "A program running on this computer is trying to display a message"

Answer 1

You cannot start an interactive application from a Windows Service. This was changed in Windows Vista and 7.

Some other advice was given in this Stack Overflow answer on the same subject.

When I've needed to do this, I had to change my Windows Service to a Console Application, and invoked it in that manner.

Answer 2

A work-around I found for this issue was to use the windows task scheduler. You can schedule the application to run some amount of seconds later by creating a batch file.

Answer 3

At my previous company we had this issue and we wrote a console app that ran in the sys tray and acted as a bridge from the service to the desktop. Basically via remoting (I'd use WCF now of course) we let the service request that the console app start up another application.