Question

I have 2 windows services on a server that have simply stopped working. They work fine on my local system and until 2pm or thereabouts yesterday they were working fine. I have no idea what has happened to them. They are shown as started in the Windows Services window but they do not work.

I have checked and tried the following

1. I have restarted them
2. I have uninstalled and reinstalled them with the same code
3. I have uninstalled and reinstalled them with the code on my machine (which is the same as the code on the server since no changes have been made to them)
4. I know that there is no error in the code, since one of them is an email sending service and if there was an error it would write to the database – this is not happening.
5. I know that the database connection string is correct since it was working before and besides I would not be able to start the service with an incorrect connection string
6. I know the service is not even attempting to send emails because if there was a problem, say with the connection to the mail server it would have written something to the database.
7. I have restarted the server

Nothing is working. I can’t figure out why Windows Services that were working fine would just stop doing anything.

Please can you help.

Thanks,

Sachin

Answer 1

I can’t give you a definite answer, but when dealing with Windows service problems, this little trick has helped me A LOT:

Simply put

System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch()

In your code, and it will launch VS and work as a break point. From here you might ba able to step thought your code and see what’s going wrong. This will only help you if VS is available to you on your production machine though..