Install windows service without visual studio command prompt

In this post I am going to cover small but very useful information about how you can install .NET windows service without visual studio command prompt.

Many developers use visual studio's command prompt which is avilable under visual studio tools to install or uninstall windows service while in developement environment where Visual Studio is installed but some of them still not aware how they can install same .NET windows service on a machine where no visual studio is installed and therefore no visual studio command prompt is available e.g. client machine or deployment environment. So I decided to share this information here.

If you want to install .NET windows service on machine where visual studio is not installed and only .NET framework is installed then you can use normal command prompt to install or uninstall the windows service.

To install the .NET windows service first you need to locate the "InstallUtil.exe" as per the framework version you are targeting for your windows service. Suppose you are targeting verison 4.0 then you can find "InstallUtil.exe" under following location.

Just copy above path and run cmd.exe as administrator and type command like below.

Then to install specific windows service you can copy the windows service exe path and can type a command like below.

That's it. If there is no any error in your windows service code then your service gets installed successfully.

To uninstall just type command like below.

Hope you have liked this post and you have benefited from it. Thanks.