Many developers find it annoying to debug the built-in Windows Service projects in Visual Studio. You can’t simply create a new project and click the “Run” button in Visual Studio and expect it to run with a debugger attached, like you can with most other project types. Normally you would install the service, start it, and attach a debugger to the process, but this is a hassle and doesn’t help much if you need to debug issues in the OnStart method.
To solve this problem and help with diagnostics, I typically add some boilerplate logic to my Windows Service projects. By passing in command line args to my service .exe, I can either have it launch in a light-weight debug console or make it wait to call the OnStart method until a debugger is attached.
