Hosting Windows Services in IIS

Brian RitchieChief ArchitectPayformance Corporation

Email: brian.ritchie@gmail.comBlog: http://weblog.asp.net/britchieWeb: http://www.dotnetpowered.com

Take advantage of the IIS platform for hosting your Always-On services.

Who am I?

» Chief Architect at Payformance Corporation» Nearly 20 years of development experience» Developing on .NET since 1.0 Beta 1» Contributed to Mono and other

open source projects

Brian Ritchie

Why build Windows Services?

» When you need always-on functionality

» Examples:˃ File Watching & Processing

˃ Scheduled tasks

˃ Long-running tasks

˃ Queued processing

Windows Services have been around forever, why

change now?

Why build Windows Services?

Sometimes change is good

Reasons for change

» Windows Services have no User Interface

making them hard to monitor, manage, and

debug.

» Windows Services are harder to deploy & can’t

use Web Deploy.

Who can save us from these problems?

I’m IIS & I’m here to help!

Did you say IIS?

» More than just a web server, IIS is an application server platform.˃ Web Applications: ASP.NET, PHP, and more˃ Web Services: ASMX, WCF˃ Multiple Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, Named PipesAnd now…˃ Always-On Services: Auto-start & Always Running

What makes IIS better?

Single hosting framework for all application components. Web sites, services, and long running services can be hosted using the same framework & management tools.

Improved deployment capabilities. XCOPY deployment is now possible or use the new Web Deploy functionality. Web Deploy is enough of a reason by itself!

Provide self-hosted management or monitoring web pages. You can easily add web pages to services to provide status on their work load.

Utilize IIS automatic management features. Optionally configure your service to recycle on a given interval or based on memory usage, just like any other IIS hosted service.

IIS7: Your Single Hosting Framework

IIS7

Windows Activation Service (WAS)

Protocol Adapters

WWW Service(W3WC)

HTTP

HTTPS

NET PIPE

TCP

App Pools

Worker Process (W3WP)

ASP.NET

ASP

PHP

WCF

Always-On

Management Service

Admin Service

Monitoring via the IIS Manager

» Since all services will be hosted under the w3wp.exe process name, you can see the Worker Process associated with your application pool within the IIS manager:

Monitoring via Process Explorer

» Another approach is to use the SysInternals Process Explorer free from Microsoft. Add the “Command Line” column to the grid, and the application pool name will be listed after the –ap switch.

Deployments…made easy

Build/Deploy Server

Deploy

IISServer

IIS MMC – Import Application

Package

Build Server(using MSBuild)

DeploymentPackage

IIS MMC – Export Application

» Web Deploy 2.1

Look Mom…I have a UI now!

» No longer “invisible”, your service can publish its own monitoring & management capability

OK…I’m sold!

How can I take this beauty home today?

Getting Started

» First off…Install the pre-reqs:˃ IIS 7.5 (Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 7)˃ Windows Server AppFabric˃ .NET Framework 4.0

» Next…Configure IIS:˃ Set Application Pool to “Always Running”˃ Configure Site with Net.Pipe Binding˃ Set Application to “Auto Start”

Walk Thru: Configuring IIS

Building a service

Building a service

» What are some fundamental differences between a standard Web Service and a Windows Service?A. Request-Response vs. Event-based B. State-less vs. State-fullC. Transparent threading vs. Thread ManagementD. DLL vs. EXEE. All of the Above

Building a Service:Differences in Process

Models

» Windows Service Process Model Service

(EXE)Service

ControllerMMC

Building a Service:Differences in Process

Models

» Windows Service Process Model

» IIS Worker Process Model

Service(EXE)

Service Controller

W3WP

WWW Publishing

Service

svchost.exe -k iissvcs

MMC

IIS Manager

AppDomain

AppDomain

Service(DLL)

Building a service

» Where does the service perform it’s startup?A. Application_Start in Global.asaxB. AppInitialize in AppStart.csC. AppStartup in the session controller

Building a service

» What is the scope of a static variables?A. ClassB. ThreadC. AppDomainD. ProcessE. Machine

Visualizing the stack

Machine

Process

AppDomain

Thre

ad

Thre

ad

StaticScope

Your service runs here

Either you manage threads directly or use a Thread Pool or TPL

Walk Thru: Building a service

Thanks for coming!» Twitter: @brian_ritchie» Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/britchie