Restarting Windows service upon exception

[pettrer]

Hi,

I have made changes to a colleague's Windows service and it works fine. It's an email service hosted on our web server.

In almost all functions there are try...catch blocks, such as this one:

...
        Catch ex As Exception
            Fellogg("An error has occured in Sendmail" & ex.ToString)
            S_AllMail = False
        End Try
    End Function

The problem is that when the error is caught, the service won't stop and restart (I have set its properties to always restart upon stopping); it just hangs, which might not be so strange as there is really nothing that tells the service to stop (e.g., Me.Stop() or the like).

What do I need to insert before the End Try in order to actually stop/restart the service, if it's at all possible?

I don't want to do a lot of experimenting as I need to do this live and I hope that one of you knows if there is something I can do to accomplish this task. Surprisingly I haven't found anything on the Internet on this subject, but only what to do when an error ISN'T caught.

Warm regards from a snowy Sweden,

Pettrer

 

[cjard]

I'd suggest that something is happening in your service that is causing the lockup, possibly not related to the error. You might well be better off removing ALL try/catch blocks apart from the one around the ServiceBase.Run call and in the catch for that, use the EventLog.WriteEntry and write a full stack trace.

Don't forget that you can attach the debugger to an already running process if you copy the relevant PDB files out along side the exe

 

[pettrer]

Hello cjard,

Thanks for both of your insightful suggestions. We will surely try them!

Pettrer