Although the right thing to do when programming a windows service is to use Microsoft’s API from the very beginning, it may also be desirable to run a regular executable as a service.
A typical candidate would be a legacy TCP server, so that you get:
Microsoft had already noticed this, so they provide the executable SRVANY as part of the Windows Resource Kit; but sometimes installing the whole resource kit may not be an option, specially in a production server.
It would be nicer to have a small application you could just xcopy-deploy that would allow you to install, remove and update the properties of your service candidate.
Here’s where CygWin’s little {{cygrunsrv}} comes handy. Notice that, although it behaves nicely with cygwin apps, it can be used with any Win32 executable.
To use it, you just need to put the files cygrunsrv.exe and cygwin1.dll in the same directory and go. Unfortunately, both files lie in different packages and cannot, AFAIK, be downloaded on their own, so the first time you’ll have to download and uncompress the files {{cygrunsrv-1.34.1.tar.bz2}} and {{cygwin-1.7.9-1.tar.bz2}}, (version may differ in the future) from whatever mirror is most suitable for you.
The full documentation for this tool is here.