Home/ Questions/Q 214289
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T18:21:36+00:00

Is it true that a service written in C# is unable to give visual

  • 0

Is it true that a service written in C# is unable to give visual feedback to the desktop?

I understand that services start up before user logon and at that point ther is no desktop available. My question then, apart from logging events in the system event log which is not a very efficient way of communicating to the user, what are my alternatives for showing a message box from a service?

Only two options come to mind:

  1. MessageBox.Show – Looking around it seems this is not going to be an option.
  2. Show a custom form

I’ve not given the reasons for why this messagebox needs to be shown.
Please assume that it needs to be shown as I don’t want responses on “good practice”. Not at this point at least.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A windows service should not perform interactions with a user. Instead you should create a seperate control or configuration application – often put into the system tray – that communicates with the service an can present information to the user or gather inputs.

    See this Knowledge Base article and this MSDN article if you really want to do this. They contain some hints how to achiev this an you will probably need to use P/Invoke from C#.

    • 0