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I've recently had to get to know it quite well. Having come from the old school of Windows services development and adding them to the SMC using installation media, I've come to like TopShelf very much.
Is anyone else using it? I'd like to read your experiences (good or bad) about it.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Never heard of, but now added to my learn list...Thanks.
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Three advantages that I've come to like so far are:
1. If your application is called fred.exe then running it in a command window as "fred.exe install" will install it as a service and "fred.exe uninstall" will remove it. That's far easier on the eye!
2. To debug a Windows service you'd have to attach a process to it in VS. That's fine to a point but it gets a bit messy if you want to debug the Start event. With TopShelf, that's a thing of the past; all you do is run it like you would a console application. I can't tell you how much time that has saved me this last week.
3. Its HostFactory lambda methods also have a lot of goodies you can bring to the party.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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The first two not new to me - you can see my article about windows service to host WCF services (Windows Service to Host Multiple WCF Services[^]), where I have these features - or most of them. What catch me eyes that TopShelf provides a unified API for service configuration and that is compatible with Mono...
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Again, I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with this product, but I and I think most people tend to write Windows Services so that they can run as a console app. (with a -console switch or something similar) to aid development and debugging.
I will look at this this morning and see if I'm missing out!
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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Me neither heard of ,thank you for the reference.
Sorry for my bad English
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I'm working on a windows service right now, and haven't heard of TopShelf, but I did just look it up...
Its interesting in that as you mentioned, you can debug with the start instead of attaching to the process, however the big turn-off for me is the inability to host multiple services. They said something about a plug-in being available later, but I really don't want to create one executable for the 8 or so services that are going into this project...
I may re-visit when they come out with the extensions to allow multiple services.
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Ron, that's a fair observation and I too read about that on the website. To be honest, I've never required multiple services before but I know there are reasons why some projects need that facility.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Yeah, the documentation is not very clear in that respect and when I first read it, that's what I thought, too.
However, after using TopShelf for about 3 months now, I can tell you that this is not the case. I think what that means is that you can only have one service per application. In the application I'm working on currently, I have 4 services (each in their own exe), running with TopShelf.
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Thats the problem, I have around 8 services in a single EXE, I don't want to break them into individual EXE's because it doesn't make sense to segregate them in the respective app domains. They share a lot of data and I'd rather not add the overhead of piping between services.
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We use it at work, though I haven't touched it directly. Those who have used it have been impressed.
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I've just started looking at this and it's not going well. On the website I'd expect a clear rationale for it's existence. But what they tell me it does is this:
"Remove that friction" - totally meaningless.
"Robusto!" - also totally meaningless but alluding to something to do with AppDomains.
"Cross-Platform" - OK, fair enough.
"Fueled by Awesome" - oh dear, product evaluation terminated.
When you click on 'learn more' on any of these, nothing happens.
It may be a good product, but the marketing sucks.
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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100% agree. I couldn't make sense of those awful Americanisms used on the website either. I thought those links were somehow nuked by Firefox but I wasn't that stupid to load IE; I really didn't feel that lucky.
I don't know what the buffoons were thinking when they put the website together. As they say, it's neither useful or ornamental.
Eventually I did find some documentation about the way it works and the command line options and from that point the content was surprisingly useful and helpful. I just installed our service on two machines and it was quite pain free even though the birth was a bit sore. The next one should be much easier. 
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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If memory serves NServiceBus may have been using this when I was still using NServiceBus (v1.9). They may still be. I needed something similar and ended developing my own generic host to do the little bit I required for my FOSS service bus (Shuttle).
I'm on a drive to get my documentation up to scratch for the 2.1.2 release but if you are interested in taking a look at the code (or nuget 'PM> Install-Package shuttle-core'): NuGet Package Page[^]
The NuGet package contains *everything* but I'll be creating individual packages for the various components.
The GitHub project for the core that contain Shuttle.Core.Host is here: https://github.com/Shuttle/shuttle-core[^]
The docs *really* need work but will be on GitHub pages (still empty): http://shuttle.github.io/shuttle-core/[^]
Probably not quite at the level of TopShelf but you may find it interesting.
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I've never used it, but except for the Mono compatibility I see no reason to do so.
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I've been using it for four years. I've introduced it to 3 different teams who were all still developing services the hard way (creating a windows service installer project then attaching to the service and debugging).
1) it makes it easy to install your service, just "[yourservice].exe -install" and it's very configurable.
2) it makes it easy to develop against. We have multiple service projects in our solution. We just set up debugging to start all the relevant services at once. Hit F5 and they are all running - no install needed. To be fair a lot of places do this w/o TopShelf, but why re-invent the wheel?
3) supports transactional installs (install fails you can create rollback steps)
4) supports service recovery (actions to take on first, second and third service failure: restart service, run a program or restart computer)
5) It would easily support hosting multiple services, but you'd have to provide that yourself - there's nothing stopping you, it just isn't out of the box. At a couple places I've written a single host console that will boostrap and host any dll as a service as long as there's a class that implements the interface I'm looking for. Modifying it to host multiple services would be pretty simple I assume.
It really is a fantastic open source project and its free so complaining about the website and docs is really just nit-picking.
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- For simplicity without writing install scripts.
- For easy starting and stopping form the command line.
- For very easy logic to create a service, add all the configuration in one place. (name, restart, user configuration).
- For easy debugging as a console application.
- For easy integration to Dependency Injection.
- For easy trapping of fatal errors in your service with a simple try catch around the top shelf process.
It is definitely the easiest way to write services that I know of.
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Note that I have never used Windows Live Mail and Google has loaded me with millions of hits that turn out to be Windows Mail as opposed to Windows Live Mail.
One of my jobs tomorrow is for a customer that is unable to send emails from Windows Live Mail but is able to receive. The job description also mentions unable to get an SSL connection but the last 3 weeks I have been working through this company has proven that the Help Desk is not able to give a decent description of what I am heading into.
I know I will get on site and see and error message that will give me the answer, but just in case it isn't that straight forward I'm looking for some advanced help.
Anyone have any experience with or links to supporting Windows Live Mail configuration or using problems?
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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My condolences, I hope you will get better in a few day s time...
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Have you tried searching for "Windows Live Mail" in quotes along with whatever search terms you wish. For example, a search for <"Windows Live Mail" can receive cannot send"> seems to produce relevant hits.
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This may be a bit late, but outside of an actual network issue such as a blocked port the connection details for live servers are;
Incoming Server: pop3.live.com
Outgoing Server: smtp.live.com
Incoming Port (POP3): 995
Outgoing Port (SMTP): 587
Make sure that "My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication" and "This server requires an encrypted conection" is ticked.
Encryption type: TLS
People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs
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Rod Kemp wrote: This may be a bit late, but outside of an actual network issue such as a blocked port the connection details for live servers are;
Incoming Server: pop3.live.com
Outgoing Server: smtp.live.com
Incoming Port (POP3): 995
Outgoing Port (SMTP): 587
Make sure that "My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication" and "This server requires an encrypted conection" is ticked.
Encryption type: TLS
Thanks, found all this while on site. She had ports 110 and 25, turned out I needed port 465 for SMTP.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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This is so cool[^] (no pun intended!)
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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