Windows Service Manager

If you are developing WCF or any other technology that requires working with windows services then you are on the right page.

The WSM (Windows Service Manager) is an extension for Visual Studio to manage windows services directly from the inside of Visual Studio IDE. The WSM extension allows:

1. Start, Stop, or Restart multiple Windows services in one go or one by one
2. Install a new Windows service and uninstall multiple Windows services at the same time
3. Attach a Visual Studio debugger to a service
4. Search a Windows service by its name
5. Resolve dependencies of a Windows service and stop the dependent services before stopping the selected service
6. Show all logged events by double-clicking on the service
7. Allow searching an event by the source of the event

Note: To have all functionalities up and running the visual studio must be run under admin rights.

Thus, if you stop a service, which has a dependency on other services the WSM will take care of all other dependent services and will stop them in respected order. The WSM will also bridge the windows event view with windows services, meaning that if a service has failed during its start/stop process by double-clicking on the service you will be redirected to a window that will show all events that the service logged in the Windows Event\Application Events.

Why WSM? Without WSM every time that you need to start/stop a windows service you have to go through the Task Manager or Services window and find manually your service by scrolling up/down and select to stop or start. Then if the service didn`t start or failed to stop and you wanted to see the log entries that the service has created in the windows events you must go to the Event Viewer and search for the log entries that are created by the service from thousands of events manually. The same story goes for installing or uninstalling service which requires using a command line. The WSM will automate all these steps and will allow you to not get lost between different windows and records while you are developing.

Getting Start

1. Download the extension and install it by double-clicking on the WindowsServiceManager.vsix file.
2. Open the Visual Studio and from the menu bar navigate to View\Other Windows\Windows Service Manager.
3. Filter your interesting service/services by entering the service name.
4. Now you can search for a service, start/stop/kill/uninstall, or go to events that the service created by double-clicking on the service ( see the following screenshots).

After double-clicking on Adobe service you will be navigated to the below window to see the events

Report issues I will be happy if you report issues by using the Q&A part on this page.