Automatically build and deploy .NET core 3 console application as a Windows service

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In this post, I want to share an example of using Azure Devops to automatically build and deploy a .NET console application as a windows service to run on a Windows VM.

Enable .NET core 3 app to run as a windows service

For this example, I have scaffolded a simple .NET core console application using Visual Studio. It is a very rudimentary app which logs out a message every minute until stop. You can generate a similar project using Worker Service Template as a starting point. You can checkout the codes for this project on my Github repo.

At the high level, to enable a .NET core app to run as a windows service, you need the following:

• You need to add the nuget package: Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.WindowsServices
• Call UseWindowsService() in Program.cs file, when creating the host builder.
• Your service class need to implement BackgroundService class.
• Register the service by calling the AddHostedService extension method.

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args)
        {
            return Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
                .ConfigureServices((hostContext, services) =>
                {
                    services.AddHostedService<Worker>();
                })
                .UseWindowsService();
        }

To learn more about running .NET core 3 app as a windows service, checkout this article.

In order to run as a Windows Service we need our worker to listen for start and stop signals from ServiceBase the .NET type that exposes the Windows Service systems to .NET applications.

Build the app

I have setup a CI pipeline to automatically build the artifact.

# Add steps that run tests, create a NuGet package, deploy, and more:
# https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/languages/dotnet-core

trigger:
- master

pool:
  vmImage: 'windows-latest'

variables:
  buildConfiguration: 'Release'

steps:
- script: dotnet build --configuration $(buildConfiguration)
  displayName: 'dotnet build $(buildConfiguration)'…