Hosting ASP.NET Core as Windows service

Question

As I get it in RC2 there\'s a support for hosting applications within Windows Services. I tried to test it on a simple web api project (using .NET Framework 4.6.1).

Answer 1

Using the latest VS2015 Update 2 ASP.NET Core Web Application (.NET Framework) template and with the mods to Program.cs as below, it is working just fine when run as a service, stand-alone and in VS. Notice that the path to the directory containing wwwroot needs to be set when run as a service.

So far, I really like this template and pattern. Can develop MVC6 code as usual in Visual Studio and then it deploys cleanly as a service. In fact, I noticed that when deploying a local instance of the service for testing that there is no need to delete/create service using sc.exe. Just stop the service, publish the code and restart the service and it'll pick up the new changes.

public class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        IWebHost host = new WebHostBuilder()
            .UseKestrel()
            .UseContentRoot(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory())
            .UseIISIntegration()
            .UseStartup<Startup>()
            .Build();

        if (args.Contains("--windows-service"))
        {
            host = new WebHostBuilder()
            .UseKestrel()
            .UseContentRoot("<directory-containing-wwwroot>")
            .UseIISIntegration()
            .UseStartup<Startup>()
            .UseUrls("http://+:5000")
            .Build();

            Startup.is_service = true;
            host.RunAsService();
        }
        else
        {
            host.Run();
        }
    }
}