David_Wallis

I have written a couple of services that run on one of our servers and I want to have a console app displaying the output / status of these... Can / should I use the trace function to do this?? or is this more for debugging purposes?

Anybody got any examples of how to do this? Preferably in Visual Basic .Net

David

David_Wallis

BTTT

TopBanana

Well you could go to the hassle of extending the Tracing stuff, but then you'd have to use remoting between apps

Couldn't you just have the service open a console window? (Will have to set the service to allow interaction with desktop)

David_Wallis

not really as I want to be able to open the window whenever... not just when the service starts..

David

TopBanana

So have an icon in the system tray

IWatkins

David,

No idea if this is of use, but I write a lot of services in Delphi. They have no interaction with the desktop at all (so users can't break them). But I also write a "control panel" for them that talks to the service via custom messages. In fact, the service also writes custom messages but if the "control panel" isn't running, nothing happens and the rest of the system ignores them. Works well in so much as if the "control panel" fails, gets knocked over etc. it doesn't take the service with it.

Wouldn't have a clue how to do this with .net, new fangled malarky

Cheers

Ian

David_Wallis

That is exactly what I want to do... Can you give an example of how you do this in delphi, as I know people that do both languages.

Its not that I dont want the service to open a window or have a system tray icon, its just that a service should have no interaction with the desktop really... it should just sit there and run.. If I was going to do it these ways there would be no point in writing it as a service...

David

David_Wallis

bttt

Crispin

David,

Did you write the services in .FRED? (I mean .NET) Or are they written in C++?

MrDeference

Could write a tracing listener that writes to a log file?

EDIT: Or writes to the event log.

BTW : Remoting isn't difficult - if you want a walk down that path, I'll hold your hand

[Edited by MrDeference - 5/30/2002 11:24:41 AM]

David_Wallis

They are written in VB.net as thats my language... (to some extent)... How does remoting work? is it like a message queue?? Ideally I dont want to write to a file and it allready writes to the event log, but the status msgs could be every min, so didnt want to write all to the event log, and then have the app read from the event log, with some sort of filter....

I also had a stupid idea of being able to monitor it from another machine, but that was just being stupid!

Mr deference if you could that would be good...

Email me offline if you prefer

David

edited to add .net and remove email add.

[Edited by David_Wallis - 5/30/2002 11:32:19 AM]

[Edited by David_Wallis - 5/30/2002 11:55:31 AM]

MrDeference

David,
YHM.


EDIT: The public part of this message reads : Remoting is the replacement for DCOM.

[Edited by MrDeference - 5/30/2002 11:53:49 AM]

IWatkins

Hi David,

Sorry, been on the road all day today.

Can it wait until the second half of next week ? I ask as I can't get to my source code until then

Cheers

Ian

David_Wallis

Yeah No probs.. I might be onto something at the moment... couldnt get it working today, think it might have been cos I was tired at work... going to give it my best shot tomorrow. Its annoying me...

Seems like as MrDeference said the way to do it is use remoting... This seems to talk across a tcp port... at the moment just pointing to localhost but this presents a lot better opportunities for me...

David

TopBanana

Don't forget about security - the tcp channel listens on all interfaces for the given port. If you want to lock this down, you'll need to add a channel sink. I still reckon you should have done it the easy way , good learning opportunity I guess though!

David_Wallis

How to you do this, or do you just know that is what needs to be done.

David

IWatkins

David,

If you can get remoting working (I've never tried), that would give you better options with regards to having the 'console' on one machine and the service on another if I understand it correctly.

The method I use, is to broadcast messages within Windows after first registering a custom message. This will not work across a network as it uses the Windows message queue.

But I'll get something together for you next week anyway, you never know....

Cheers

Ian

David_Wallis

Cheers.

David

TopBanana

David_Wallis: you don't *need* to sort out the security, but if you want to, I suggest you read up on adding a channel sink. What you do is effectively add an event handler to the chain on top of the remoting transport. You need to read up on remoting if you want to get it all to work

David_Wallis

looking at how much progress I'm making at the moment (not much) I think I may have to buy a decent book.. or move towards using C# as this seems the favoured language for remoting.

David

IWatkins

Another option I didn't think of...

Depending quite how much info you need, and the format of it, SysInternals may have what you need: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/fr...ebugview.shtml

Basically write a string to OutputDebugString (which is a basic API call). If nothing is there to hear it, nothing happens. However, if you fire this application up, setup filters and all the info. from your service will appear in this window.

I'd forgotten about this, but it is a tool I sometimes use for debugging stuff.

---------------------------------------------------------
The OutputDebugString function sends a string to the debugger for the current application.

VOID OutputDebugString(
LPCTSTR lpOutputString // pointer to string to be displayed
);

Parameters
lpOutputString
Points to the null-terminated string to be displayed.

Return Values
This function does not return a value.
---------------------------------------------------------

Looks as though this will work over a network too so might suit ozzy's problem as well. (I'll link in).

Cheers

Ian

[Edited by IWatkins - 5/31/2002 2:43:42 PM]

MrDeference

Had some problems with that in the land of .NET. I don't think that System.Diagnostics.Trace uses OutputDebugString().

David_Wallis

the way I have got is working now... but I think there is something simple at fault... and with MrDeference's expert help Im sure ill get it sorted!

David