How to make GUI wait for windows service?

Question

I wrote a windows service and a gui for it. Of course gui mainly depends on the service. Is there a way for gui to wait for the service? Sometimes I need to reload service config from the gui and restart the service.

I was thinking about 2 solutions: 1. using while and sleep to wait for service controller status to change (of course the simplest solution :P) 2. implementin INotifiPropertyChanged interface somewhere (this looks to complicated for this trivial problem).

I was wondering is there more elegant way of doing it? Is there an event that I am missing somewhere?

Answer 1

I'd probably spawn a seperate thead to simply poll and see when your service controller status has changed, when the change occurs kill this thread. Then simply re spawn the thread when you need to start re-poll

Darknight

Answer 2

ServiceController mysqlServiceController = new ServiceController();
mysqlServiceController.ServiceName = "MySql";
var timeout = 3000;

myServiceController.Start();

try
{
    //Wait till the service runs mysql      
    ServiceController.WaitForStatus(System.ServiceProcess.ServiceControllerStatus.Running, new TimeSpan(0, timeout, 0));
}
catch (System.ServiceProcess.TimeoutException)
{
    MessageBox.Show(string.Format("Starting the service \"{0}\" has reached to a timeout of ({1}) minutes, please check the service.", mysqlServiceController.ServiceName, timeout));
}

Answer 3

Use a kernel Event object. When you start both apps, have them create or open a named Event object, then wait on it. The other can signal it, flipping the state thus allowing the other app to stop waiting and run.

Answer 4

ServiceController has a method WaitForStatus where you pass it an argument of type ServiceControllerStatus. You can use it like this:

controller.WaitForStatus(ServiceControllerStatus.Running);

Answer 5

Use an EventWaitHandle. Your GUI can wait on the WaitHandle and the service will set it which will trigger the GUI to continue on with what it was doing before it started waiting. No polling, no looping, no mess.

This great article on C# threading is probably a better resource for info on WaitHandles