C#/.NET: Detect whether program is being run as a

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• Am I Running as a Service 12 answers

I have a C#/.NET program that can run both as a console application and as a service. Currently I give it a command-line option to start as a console application, but I would like to avoid that.

Is it possible to programmatically detect whether my program is being started as a service?

If it was pure Win32, I could try starting as a service with StartServiceCtrlDispatcher and fall back to console if it returned ERROR_FAILED_SERVICE_CONTROLLER_CONNECT, but System.ServiceProcess.ServiceBase.Run() pops up an errordialog if it fails and then just returns without signaling an error to the program.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Rasmus, this is the earlier question.

From the answers it seems the most popular way is to use a simple command line option, or try accessing the Console object in a try catch block (in a Service the Console is not attached to the process and trying to access it throws an exception).

Or if you're having trouble testing/debugging the service, move code into a separate dll assembly and create a seprate test harness (winforms/console etc).

(Just noticed that Jonathan has added his solution to the end of the question.)

Answer 2

Environment.UserInteractive will do the magic.

Answer 3

Using the ParentProcessUtilities struct from this answer about finding a parent process, you can do this:

static bool RunningAsService() {
    var p = ParentProcessUtilities.GetParentProcess();
    return ( p != null && p.ProcessName == "services" );
}

Note that the process name for the parent process does not include the extension ".exe".

Answer 4

Might want to try SessionId property of the Process object. In my experience SessionId is set to 0 if the process is running a service.

Answer 5

I ended up detecting whether or not I was in a console application by checking Console.IsErrorRedirected. It returned "false" for console apps, and "true" for the non-console apps I tested. I could have also used IsOutputRedirected.

I imagine there are circumstances where these will not be accurate, but this worked well for me.

Answer 6

I don't know if this will work, but you may want to try using PInvoke with this code and checking if the parent is "services.exe".