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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T21:25:21+00:00

I have a windows service written in C# .NET framework 3.5 and would like

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I have a windows service written in C# .NET framework 3.5 and would like to know the best way to check if previous shutdown of a service was regular.

Upon starting the service, there should be a check if the last shutdown was regular (via stop service button in services management) or if somebody just killed the process (or it crashed for some reason not directly linked to the service itself).

I thought about writing encrypted XML on a hard drive upon starting a service, and then editing it with some values when service is being stopped. In that way, after I start the service again next time, I could check the XML and see if the values were edited in correct way during shutdown, and if they were not I’d know the process was killed or it crashed.

This way seems too unreliable and not a good practice. What do you suggest?

Clarification:
What the service does is it sits on a server and listens to connections from client machines. Once the connection has been established, it communicates to a remote database via web services and determines whether they have right to connect (and therefore use application that is the caller). One of the aspects of protection is concurrency check, and if I have a limit set to 5 work stations, I keep the TcpClient connection alive from windows service to, let’s say 5 workstations, and the sixth one cannot connect.

If I kill the service process and restart it, the connections are gone and I have 5 “licensed” apps running on workstations, and now there are 5 free connection slots to be taken by 5 more.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I went with this in the end:
    Service used to check up on the connected workstations to see if they’re alive, but now I’ve built in periodical check from all the workstations as well (they connect through a common router dll where I’ve built in the check). Every 10 seconds the connection is verified, and if there is none, the client will try to reconnect in 15 seconds, which will be successful if there was just a temporary network problem, but will fail if the service was shut down forcefully (since all it’s Tcp objects will be lost).

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