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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T09:13:02+00:00

I have a requirement that a Windows Forms C# .NET 2.0 program running in

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I have a requirement that a Windows Forms C# .NET 2.0 program running in user-space (not a service) must always be running. As I’m not infallible and make coding mistakes, I wanted to know of any extra safeguards I could use to ensure this requirement is met. The things I’ve been thinking of are TaskScheduler to check it every 5 minutes, A stub watcher or a secondary process. Are these good / bad ideas?

Thanks,
Richard

EDIT: The reason I didn’t use a service (the obvious and sensible answer!) was the program runs in a kiosk type environment and has has a heavy GUI component. The service option didn’t work well across Windows 2000 – W7.

EDIT: The second reason not to use a service was the app needs internet access and on some of our customer sites, proxies are set up to only allow specific users (not the local system account) so it would be tricky to ensure access if multiple users log onto the machine.

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  1. Editorial Team

    There are three approaches that you can take:

    1. Heartbeat Message.

      A heartbeat is useful in a distributed application and is simply message that is sent (from let say a client to server) to confirm that it is still healthy/running.

    2. Manager Process

      A stub program, implemented as either a user process or a service. It launches the main application, monitors any unhandled exceptions, reports errors, and restarts on failure.

    3. An exception guard on the entry point.

      A try-catch-all in the application entry point.

    I would recommend either of the first two options; the third option, the try-catch-all, is a particular nasty hack for the lazy and inexperienced programmer (IMHO).

    I have successfully used both heartbeat and manager process in a large distributed application.

    UPDATE

    As for ready-to-go™ restart managers, take a look at the Windows API Codepack as discussed in Emmanuel Istace blog post (http://istacee.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/automatic-recovery-restart-in-net-application/).

    You can install the package from https://www.nuget.org/packages/WindowsAPICodePack-Core/

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