Question

We have an ATL Service written in Visual Studio 6 which is now requiring some changes. This is being done on a new development machine. When this is built on this machine, the service does not show up in services.msc. From what I have read this is by design. In order for it to show up I type “servicename.exe /service” into a command prompt. However, it still doesn’t show up. Is there anything obviously missing here?

Answer 1

Two reasons I can think of, assuming the service code was not broken by the change:

1. You must have administrative privileges in order to register a service. If you dev machine has UAC on (and it should), just writing the command won’t be enough. You must run a cmd.exe as an administrator (right click + run as admin), and then do the registration from there.
2. If the services console is open while you try to register a new service, the registration might fail. I’ve no idea why, but I’ve come across this issue more than once. So make sure you close service.msc before you run the registration.

Other than that, you might find some clues in the event viewer.