Question

When running a program, such as notepad, as a service do you not see the program visually? I see notepad running in the task manager but I can t actually see its instance running. Why is this?

Answer 1

Services are meant as background applications, not foreground applications. Generally they run without direct user input or with user input through IPC (often providing a centralized point for multiple applications to communicate).

It s not common to setup any applications to just run as a service. Applications that run as a service are generally specifically engineered to do so because they perform certain tasks and may want to always be running to perform such tasks.

Answer 2

An application actually needs to support running as a service - typically it is done by recognizing the "service" command line key. Some applications will recognize the absence of the "service" key and either do nothing or show a warning.

When an application is started "as a service" it usually means that it has to work continuously in background and there s a chance that no user is currently logged on. That s why it should not expect any user input and therefore doesn t show the window.

Answer 3

Adding on @Quintin Robinson s answer, the reason why they doesn t show up on task manager is because they are (usually) run from an umbrella process.

To give you a better picture, download and run Microsoft s Process Explorer, then hold your mouse over one of the "svchost.exe" process running.

You should see some of the services that are running under it.

Answer 4

All user interaction in Windows takes place via Windowstations. By default, Windows services "interact" with a non-interactive station. It s not the station you re connected to, so you don t see any output.

You can change this behavior by changing the service properties, and enabling "Allow service to interact with desktop".

You can read more about this here.

Answer 5

Applications that run as a service (or that are launched by other applications that run as a service) by default run on a separate desktop that cannot interact with the desktop you see.

If you want to be able to interact with a service, you have set the service properties accordingly.

That being said, what you re seeing with Notepad almost certainly has nothing to do with services.

友情链接