How to deploy a standalone .net forms website as an application
The Story (for coders only)… I need an application to manage background services on a website I run. These services are still in debug/development mode so I create them as Windows Forms applications rather than true “windows services”. This works well as I can breakdown the tasks and build single applications to do e.g. clean up tasks or schedule Tweets with them. Each application has a thread, and if one is misbehaving it doesn’t take down the whole system. I can Debug/Step through applications in Visual Studio and see where they going wrong, then restart them easily enough. So I currently have an “Orchestrator” application that controls all these background service apps. Current System The server is set to autologin using sysinternals autologon. Then I add a scheduled task to fire up this Orchestrator application. The Orchestrator then queries the server to see the runstate of each application in it’s list. If one is not running...