Question

What’s the best way to do some lengthy initialization when a Windows service starts up (or resumes from being paused) without blocking the Service Control Manager?

Answer 1

You can use a BackgroundWorker to perform your lengthy operation in response to the Service.Start event.

It’s easy enough to do so in the OnStart() method of your ServiceBase-derived class. There’s also a reasonable good example on MSDN.

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
    var worker = new BackgroundWorker();
    worker.DoWork += DoSomeLongOperation;

    worker.RunWorkerAsync();
}

private void DoSomeLongOperation(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
{
   // do your long operation...
}

Note that you can also subscribe to the ProgressChanged and RunWorkerCompleted events, so that you can inform the service control manager of your progress and startup success (or failure).