Question

I’ve got a windows service which scans a folder every n seconds for changes. I’m getting ‘the service did not respond to the start command in a timely fashion’ when trying to start it up.

I’ve got a loop setting off in OnStart like so:

 public void OnStart(string[] args)  {     while (!_shouldExit)     {         //Do Stuff          //Repeat         Thread.Sleep(_scanIntervalMillis);     }  } 

Is this what is causing the error? Should I delegate this method?

Answer 1

OnStart should only start the work; it isn’t responsible for doing it. This typically means spawning a new thread to do the actual work. It is expected that OnStart completes promptly. For example:

    public void OnStart(string[] args) // should this be override?     {         var worker = new Thread(DoWork);         worker.Name = 'MyWorker';         worker.IsBackground = false;         worker.Start();     }     void DoWork()     {         // do long-running stuff     }