Author: Michael Gernaey
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Pages: 384
ISBN: 978-0735624337
Aimed at: Developers who need help to write a Windows service
Rating: 2
Pros: Covers basics and beyond
Cons: Subject doesn’t merit book length treatment
Reviewed by: Ian Elliot

The biggest question about this book is why? A Windows service is a very useful thing to know how to write – but once you have got over the basics of the standard methods that need to be implemented and how it is started, stopped and paused, there isn’t much more that is specific to a service. You can cover it in a single article and indeed you can find such an article on the VSJ website. Once you get beyond this you simply need to generalise what you know about building applications to the specific environment inhabited by a service. This book covers the basics in the first few chapters. Then it moves on to cover threading, user interaction, using WMI, the Internet and all of the things that you typically need to know about to create a useful service. Of course in practice your Windows service will need to do something unique and probably not covered in this volume. The conclusion is that this book probably isn’t needed as the techniques specific to a service could be covered in a chapter and the rest is just general programming. On the other hand if you are needing a fast track to creating a service with VB 2008 you might want to have the backing of this volume.

<Reviewed in VSJ>