Exception: Error 1083: The executable program that this service is configured to run in does not implement the service.
In short: verify that the service name is correct. Totally correct.
Longer:
Debugging windows services written in dotnet can be hard. They have no GUI and have to be installed by a semi secret process. Then they have to be started by a system call. And if the start fails it is not necessarily possible to uninstall the service without rebooting. The CL.exe doesn’t work and hacking the registry doesn’t work.
Today I spent hours tracking down a bug that surfaced with a “Error 1083: The executable program that this service is configured to run in does not implement the service.” when starting the service. In the end I found out that the ServiceName was incorrect.
To be honest I got some clues, in one place it said MyMailer instead of MyMailerService. I couldn’t be sure if this was correct or not since I had inherited the project and my search turned out nothing so I dropped it.
By (almost) chance I checked into the automagically created MyMail.designer.cs file and noticed this.ServiceName=”MyMailer”. Which, it turned out, was the culprit.
I learned a trick on the way. The service has 30 (I believe) seconds to start. If it doesn’t fulfill it is shot down by Windows. When I started the process it failed and I got a question whether I wanted to debug it. Unfortunately it takes more thatn 30 s to open my VS2010. So I started VS as administrator (necessary in Win7) and loaded the project. When I then started the service I got the question whether to attach and I did. Two seconds of work and I got a highlighted row at the exact point.