IIS Always-On Services

Hosting Windows Services in IIS
Take advantage of the IIS platform for hosting your Always-On services.
Brian Ritchie
Chief ArchitectPayformance Corporation
Email: brian.ritchie@gmail.com
Blog: http://weblog.asp.net/britchie
Web: http://www.dotnetpowered.com

Who am I?
Brian Ritchie
Chief Architect at Payformance Corporation
Nearly 20 years of development experience
Developing on .NET since 1.0 Beta 1
Contributed to Mono and other open source projects

Why build Windows Services?
When you need always-on functionality
Examples:
File Watching & Processing
Scheduled tasks
Long-running tasks
Queued processing

Why build Windows Services?
Windows Services have been around forever, why change now?

Sometimes change is good

Reasons for change
Windows Services have no User Interface making them hard to monitor, manage, and debug.
Windows Services are harder to deploy & can’t use Web Deploy.

Who can save us from these problems?
I’m IIS & I’m here to help!

Did you say IIS?
More than just a web server, IIS is an application server platform.
Web Applications: ASP.NET, PHP, and more
Web Services: ASMX, WCF
Multiple Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, Named Pipes
And now…
Always-On Services: Auto-start & Always Running

What makes IIS better?

IIS7: Your Single Hosting Framework

Monitoring via the IIS Manager
Since all services will be hosted under the w3wp.exe process name, you can see the Worker Process associated with your application pool within the IIS manager:

Monitoring via Process Explorer
Another approach is to use the SysInternals Process Explorer free from Microsoft. Add the “Command Line” column to the grid, and the application pool name will be listed after the –ap switch.

Deployments…made easy
Web Deploy 2.1
Deploy
Package
Build/Deploy Server
Build Server
(using MSBuild)
Deployment
Package
IIS
Server
IIS MMC – Export Application
IIS MMC – Import Application

Look Mom…I have a UI now!
No longer “invisible”, your service can publish its own monitoring & management capability

OK…I’m sold!
How can I take this beauty home today?

Getting Started
First off…Install the pre-reqs:
IIS 7.5 (Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 7)
Windows Server AppFabric
.NET Framework 4.0
Next…Configure IIS:
Set Application Pool to “Always Running”
Configure Site with Net.Pipe Binding
Set Application to “Auto Start”

Walk Thru: Configuring IIS

Building a service

Building a service
What are some fundamental differences between a standard Web Service and a Windows Service?
Request-Response vs. Event-based
State-less vs. State-full
Transparent threading vs. Thread Management
DLL vs. EXE
All of the Above

Building a Service:Differences in Process Models
Windows Service Process Model
Service Controller
Service
(EXE)
MMC

Building a Service:Differences in Process Models
Windows Service Process Model
IIS Worker Process Model
Service Controller
Service
(EXE)
MMC
W3WP
WWW Publishing Service
svchost.exe -k iissvcs
AppDomain
Service
(DLL)
IIS Manager
AppDomain

Building a service
Where does the service perform it’s startup?
Application_Startin Global.asax
AppInitialize in AppStart.cs
AppStartup in the session controller

Building a service
What is the scope of a static variables?
Class
Thread
AppDomain
Process
Machine

Visualizing the stack
Machine
Process
AppDomain
Your service runs here
Thread
Thread
Static
Scope
Either you manage threads directly or use a Thread Pool or TPL

Walk Thru: Building a service

Twitter: @brian_ritchie
Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/britchie
Thanks for coming!

IIS Always-On Services

by Brian Ritchie on Oct 05, 2011

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IIS Always-On Services — Presentation Transcript