Question

I am maintaining a Windows Service, which has a quite unfortunate bug. I can no longer debug the code because the service simply refuses to start. This is the error:

Windows could not start the MyService service on Local Computer.

Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control
request in a timely fashion.

I inserted some log-to-file lines in the main method and it never comes past the instantiation of my windows service. It stops right before the line

ServiceBase.Run(ServicesToRun);

So the Run method is never executed. I am guessing that it is the instantiation of MyService that fails. But how is that possible?

static void Main()
{
        //this line is reached

        ServiceBase[] ServicesToRun;
        ServicesToRun = new ServiceBase[] 
        { 
            new MyService() //halts here
        };

        //this line is never executed
        ServiceBase.Run(ServicesToRun);
}

Answer 1

reposted reply from above:

Yes, I got info in the event viewer. It was basically an unhandled exception due to the fact that I had an incorrect configuration file. The windows service is supposed to parse an XML file on instantiation, but there was a “>” sign missing, which means it wasn’t even a valid XML file. So the lesson must be to have good error handling in the constructor of a windows service. Thank you all for your help.