Lately, I was working on a Windows Service using C#. Having never done such using C#, I’d thought that I’d go through the documentation that Microsoft provides. I went through it in quite a breeze; my service was running in no time.

I then added some initialisation code, which means that service startup is not instant. No problem with that; in fact the documentation has a section dedicated for such. The user’s code can provide some status update on what state the initialisation is. Unfortunately, C# does not provide this functionality; you’ll have to call native API to do so (through the SetServiceStatus call).

As I was going through the C# documentation of the struct that it accepts, I noticed that it does not match up with the documentation for the native API. The C# says that it accept long (64-bit) parameters, whilst the native API says that it accepts DWORD (32-bit) parameters. This got me thinking; is the C# documentation wrong?

I’ve whipped up two applications: one in C++ and one in C#. I checked the size of, in bytes, of the SERVICE_STATUS that SetServiceStatus expects. The answer was 28 bytes, which makes sense given that it consists of 7 DWORDs (32-bit) – 7 * 4  = 28 bytes.

size_t sizeOfServiceStatus = sizeof(SERVICE_STATUS);
cout << "Size: " << sizeOfServiceStatus << endl;

The C# application consists of copying and pasting the example in Microsoft’s documentation. After checking out the ServiceStatus struct’s size, it showed 56! Again, this was not surprising, since it consists of 6 long (64-bit) plus the ServiceState enum (which defaults to int, 32-bit) plus an additional 32-bit of padding – (6 * 8) + 4 + 4 = 56 . Therefore, the resultant struct is 56 bytes instead of 28 bytes!

int size = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(ServiceStatus));
Console.WriteLine("Size: " + size);

Unfortunately, this will still to appear to work in the code, but obviously the output of this function is undefined since the data that’s being fed in is totally out of alignment. To make matters worse, pinvoke.net reports this as Microsoft do, which threw me off in the beginning as well.

Naturally, fixing this issue is trivial; it’s just a matter of converting all longs to uint (since DWORD is an unsigned integer). Therefore, the example should look like the following:

public enum ServiceState
{
SERVICE_STOPPED = 0x00000001,
SERVICE_START_PENDING = 0x00000002,
SERVICE_STOP_PENDING = 0x00000003,
SERVICE_RUNNING = 0x00000004,
SERVICE_CONTINUE_PENDING = 0x00000005,
SERVICE_PAUSE_PENDING = 0x00000006,
SERVICE_PAUSED = 0x00000007,
}

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
public struct ServiceStatus
{
public uint dwServiceType;
public ServiceState dwCurrentState;
public uint dwControlsAccepted;
public uint dwWin32ExitCode;
public uint dwServiceSpecificExitCode;
public uint dwCheckPoint;
public uint dwWaitHint;
};