Questions about Services for Windows

Hi all,

What exactly is a Service in Windows?? like how is a service different from a program?? And does a service have to have a database??? I was looking at a Service Control program and it seems to rely on a Database. I guess i'm confused about this because I don't really understand what Services are used for in Windows. any explanations will be greatly appreciated.

thanks.

-Phil

It is kind of like a daemon in Unix. It is a process that provides a uuh... service. it cannot have a user interface.

Sort of like a daemon. A service is just a ...thing... that runs in the background and does stuff for you (usually) transparently. This is opposed to an application which would run in the foreground with some sort of interface, like a web browser, or a text editor. For example, if you were to run Apache server as a service on WinNT/2000, it would run transparently in the background looking at port 80 (or whatever port you told it to look at when you set it up). When it caught someone trying to contact the computer on port 80, it would begin processing the incoming requests, running CGIs, sending back HTML pages, etc. If you were sitting at the PC, however, you wouldn't be able to see any of this. It would all happen behind the scenes.

I was reading about Services for Windows and they are only supported on Windows NT platforms. However, they have a scaled-down version for Windows 95/98/ME. Now, my question is, does this scaled-down version also compatible on the Windows NT platforms?? You'd think it should, but its Microsoft..... so who knows.

thanks.