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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T02:07:51+00:00

I have been working on many applications which run as windows service or scheduled

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I have been working on many applications which run as windows service or scheduled tasks.

Now, i want to make sure that these applications will be fault tolerant and reliable. For example; i have a service that runs every hour. if the service crashes while its operating or running, i d like the application to run again for the same period (there are several things involved with this including transactions of data processing) , to avoid data loss. moreover, i d like the program to report the error with details. My goal is to avoid data loss and not falling behind for running the program.

I have built a class library that a user can import into a project. Library is supposed to keep information of running instance of the program, ie. program reads and writes information of running interval, running status etc. This data is stored in a database.

I was curious, if there are some best practices to make the scheduled tasks/ windows services fault tolerant and reliable.

Edit : I am talking about independent tasks or services which on different servers. and my goal is to make sure that the service will keep running, report any failures and recover from them.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I’m interested in what other people have to say, but I’ll give you a few points that I’ve stumbled across:

    1. Make an event handler for Unhandled Exceptions. This way you can clean up resources, write to a log file, email an administrator, or anything you need to instead of having it crash.

      AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException += new UnhandledExceptionEventHandler(AppUnhandledExceptionEventHandler);

    2. Override any servicebase event handlers you need in the main part of your application. OnStart and OnStop are pretty crucial, but there are many others you can use. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.serviceprocess.servicebase%28v=VS.71%29.aspx

    3. Beware of timers. Windows forms timers won’t work right in a service. User System.Threading.Timers or System.Timers.Timer. Best Timer for using in a Windows service

    4. If you are updating on a thread, make sure you use a lock() or monitor in key sections to make sure everything is threadsafe.

    5. Be careful not to use anything user specific, as a service runs without a specific user context. I noticed some of my SQL connection strings were no longer working for windows authorizations, etc. Also have heard people having trouble with mapped drives.

    6. Never make a service with a UI. In fact for Vista and 7 they make it nearly impossible to do anyway. It shouldn’t require user interaction, the most you can do is send a message with a WIN32 function. MSDN claims making interactive services is bad practice. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683502%28VS.85%29.aspx

    7. For debugging purposes, it is way cool to make a service run as a console application until you get it doing what you want it to. Awesome tutorial: http://mycomponent.blogspot.com/2009/04/create-debug-install-windows-service-in.html

    Anyway, hope that helps a little, but that is just a couple thing I poked around to find on my own.

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