Published by breki on 25 Apr 2010 at 08:52 pm
Windows Services And Working Directories
A reminder for me: when developing Windows services, in the initialization code set the Environment.CurrentDirectory to the directory where your binaries are located:
string applicationFullPath = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location;
string applicationDirectory = Path.GetDirectoryName(
Path.GetFullPath(applicationFullPath));
log.InfoFormat(
"Setting the current directory to '{0}'...",
applicationDirectory);
Environment.CurrentDirectory = applicationDirectory;
This helps avoiding problems with .NET framework implicitly accessing various file resources stored together with your binaries. I had a situation where I wanted to validate an XML file using XSD schema files stored in my application directory. The code worked OK in the integration tests but failed when run inside a Windows service. It turns out .NET Framework’s XML validation code wanted to import certain dependent XSD schema files from the current directory, which is, in the case of Windows services, C:\Windows\System32 by default. Of course, the needed XSD files weren’t there, but the validation code doesn’t really tell you this, it just reports an unhelpful validation error.
