Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Kick Start

Creating Windows Services

There are three programmer-to-programmer topics in this chapter: Windows services, Web services, and how to deploy applications using Windows installer (.MSI) files. All these issues are important ones, and we'll use them to round off the GUI-oriented application coverage. We'll start with Windows services.

Windows services are not typically front-line applications that the user runs and interacts with. Instead, they provide support services, often for device drivers, such as printer device drivers, audio devices, data providers, CD creation software, and so on. As such, Windows services don't need a real user interface as you see in standard Windows applications. They often do have a control panel-like interface that ...