What are the chances of being able to run this as a service?  Or, should I juse use sc to try to get your executable to run as a service?

 

Thanks. 

Can I ask why you would want to run it as a service?

No problem. The reason I want to be able to run this as a service is because I want to have XboxFriends running on my server at all times in order to log my friend's gaming habits on Live.  On my server, I have nothing installed on it that would require me to keep a user logged in and locked on the console, and I want to keep it that way.  I realize that this probably doesn't make sense unless one is a system admin, and even then, my wish may seem a bit crazy.  But, if I were to remote admin a server and reboot it, then I would have to remember to log in as the user that Xboxfriend was running as and start the application again.  But doing so would take up one of the remote administration sessions, and one isn't allowed to have many remote admin sessions open at a time.  I hope my reasoning makes sense.

But, I don't really know how to store the credentials within the XboxFriends application.  Maybe using .Net's impersonization abilities?
 

Why don't you just make a shortcut in the startup folder?  It will basically act the same way.

No it won't.  Having something in a profile's startup does nothing if a user is not logged onto the console.

There are many problems associated with running as a service and you've mentioned a couple of them.  The biggest problem with having a version as a service right now is one of updates... self-updating services are extremely difficult to work with and resources just don't allow for that right now.  However, to accomplish what you are wanting, you could utilize the desktop version (on a home machine) and have it notify a web server of the status changes through the HTTP Notification feature.  You could then utilize this information however you wish.  If you'd like to see an example of this in ASP.NET 2.0, please let me know and I can provide you a rough example that you use as a starting point.

And... although I haven't tried it... it might be possible to use one of the "run as service" processes to attempt to force this on the server.  This, of course, wouldn't require a seperate session to accomplish, since it would be running on the server itself.  If I'm not mistaken (it's been a while since I've done this), as soon as you sign in with the account (remotely) that you use for the service, the application will be visible.  Like I said, it's been a while, so I could be wrong on this.