Windows Service without Visual Studio interference

Question

I'd like to create and manage a Windows Service application without "help" from Visual Studio's designer.

Since this is .NET, and judging by MSDN and what the designer does, this means inheriting from Installer, and constructing and dealing with ServiceProcessInstaller and ServiceInstaller to be able to manage the install-time execution of the serivce.

Runtime, this means creating a ServiceBase subclass and starting it from Main using ServiceBase.Run (and overriding various ServiceBase event handling methods).

However, when I do this, Visual studio insists on treating the Installer and ServiceBase subclasses as designer-edited files. This doesn't exactly help readability, not to mention the fact that it generally can't deal with handwritten code at all. I'd like to avoid the designer to keep things manageable (to avoid nebulous who-knows-what-runs-when, particularly for code that's tricky to test and debug such as windows services that after all must be installed to be run at all), and also to be able to specify the service name at run-time, rather than at compile time - the designer doesn't support that.

How can I create a windows service application without all the gunk?

Answer 1

ServiceBase is derived from Component. To disable the designer view you can attach the attribute like so:

[System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategory("Code")]
public class MyService : ServiceBase
{

}