The .NET Developer's Guide to Windows Security

Chapter 27. What Is a Daemon?

In UNIX, a program that runs in the background (not attached to a terminal) is called a “daemon.” It's something you can't see, but it's alive and well doing work behind the scenes. In Windows, lots of programs run in this fashion, and they come in different forms, such as NT services, IIS worker processes, COM servers, and scheduled processes. As a programmer, it's important to know that, even though the plumbing for these daemons is different (compare an NT service with an instance of the IIS worker process, for example), there are lots of similarities among them. And it's important to know these similarities to help simplify your view of server code. Let's talk briefly about some characteristics of daemons on Windows. ...