Controlling behavior of existing services in system

This article shows how to access the windows services in your system and change the behavior of the services from your application.

The example application with this article shows a simple windows application which fetches the services into a ListView and changing its status by click of the button.

This application uses ServiceController component to connect to and control the behavior of existing services.

I have used the GetServices() method on the ServiceController class to retrieve a list of the services on a particular computer. The GetServices method returns an array of all of a computer's available services, except for those associated with device drivers. You can retrieve the device driver services using the GetDevices method.

Fetching Services:

Here is the code to fetch all the services:

private void listService()

{

ServiceController[] ser;

ser = ServiceController.GetServices();

listView1.Items.Clear();

for (int i = 0; i < ser.Length; i++)

{

string str1=ser[i].ServiceName;

System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController sc2 = new System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController(str1);

listView1.Items.Add(str1);

if (sc2.Status.Equals(System.ServiceProcess.ServiceControllerStatus.Stopped))

{

listView1.Items[i].ForeColor=Color.Red;

listView1.Items[i].SubItems.Add("Stopped");

}

else

{

listView1.Items[i].ForeColor=Color.Blue;

listView1.Items[i].SubItems.Add("Started");

}

}

}

Here I have ListView control with two columns. The first column display's the service name and the second column displays the current status.

Different row color is given for services whose status is stopped or started.

Starting Service:

The code below shows how to start the service whose status is stopped now:

private void StartService()

{

ListView.SelectedListViewItemCollection seltest = listView1.SelectedItems;

ListViewItem lt = seltest[0];