Question

What are windows services? How are they different from other .NET application? Any references or examples are welcome which sight the differences

Answer 1

Windows service is a Windows concept and generally does not really have anything to do with .NET per se other than that these could be written in .NET languages.

The main difference between a service and an ordinary windows app

• Services always run (usually started when computer boots; depending
  on design, you can manually stop or start these)
• Services have no UI
  (If you want to show UI from a service, you need to do it via a
  separate process) and mostly do not interact directly with users
• Services run in a separate Windows session (mostly, session 0) and, therefore, are (most always) shared between all users of a computer
• Services may offer recovery actions (what to do on first, second, and
  subsequent failures)
• Services are a bit harder to write and especially to debug. Thus, if
  thinking of writing a service, please consider console app +
  scheduled task first
  windows service vs scheduled task