Limitations to Standalone Services

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4/8/2010

Running a service in standalone mode poses the following limitations:

Interprocess communication mechanisms provided by Services.exe will not work with services that are loaded in standalone processes. An application cannot access a standalone service by calling CreateFile, GetServiceHandle or any of the other functions exposed by Services.exe. The service will not be listed when "services list" is run.
A number of the services that are shipped with Windows Embedded CE cannot run in standalone mode. For example, Telnet server will not work as a standalone process because it relies on the instances of cmd.exe that it spawns to be able to use the ReadFile and WriteFile functions. Web server will not work as a standalone process because other services depend on running in the same memory space as the Web server.
Windows Embedded CE is limited to 32 processes. Each standalone service consumes one of these processes. A standalone process also requires more resources than a service loaded in the non-standalone mode, because processes are much more memory-consuming than threads on Windows Embedded CE.

See Also