I am making an installshield installer and install a service during the install using installutil.exe. I would like to make this service autostart when windows boots up, is this possible? If so, how?

I thought this was more of a .net topic than an installshield one.

Thanks,

James

Normally, when creating a windows service in .NET you use an ServiceInstaller to install the service. The ServiceInstaller contains a property named StartType (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.serviceprocess.serviceinstaller.starttype(v s.80).aspx). You can set this property to one of the ServiceStartMode values (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.serviceprocess.servicestartmode(VS.80).aspx ).

So in your case, you need to set it to Automatic which indicates that the service needs to be started automatically.

Hope this helps.

Greetz,

Geert

http://geertverhoeven.blogspot.com

Many thanks for your reply. It is one of our other developers that has worked on the service and I am responsible for making the installer.

I've been doing some research on how Windows Services work and am I right in thinking that the installutil.exe is how all services are installed onto Windows (it's not a case of placing an exe onto the hard drive as in an application?)?

If so, am I right in assuming that there aren't any parameters that can be passed into installutil.exe that can make it autostart and that the only way to do this is by setting the ServiceStartMode property to Automatic in .net?

In .NET you create a class that implements ServiceInstaller I believe and installutil looks for this when installing your service. In the ServiceInstaller, you specify the start type and so on. So you do not specify start type in the service but in the service installer. In other words you are correct, the installutil does not explicitly have an option to set the start mode.

Also installutil is used for installing .NET services onto a Win32 machine that supports services (WinNT/2k/XP/Vista). Installutil will not install C++ executables for example. See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...95(vs.80).aspx for usage.