Question

I know this has probably been asked before but I can’t seem to find the right answer for me.

I have a windows service named foobar.exe. I have an application configuration file named foobar.exe.config in the same folder.

Is the config file only read at startup?

I would like to make changes to the config file without having to restart the service but that is the only way I can get the new settings read.

What am I doing wrong?

Can a windows service have a dynamic config file?

Answer 1

.NET applications will read their config files at startup and cache them for performance reasons.

I see two basic ways around this:

• in your service, keep track of the last update date/time for the config file. Check this last update date regularly and if you detect a change, re-load the config file

• a Windows NT service can respond to a special OnCustomCommand event. You could implement such an event handler to reload the config, and when you do change the config, you could have a small utility to signal to your service that the config has changed and send that “custom command” to your service