How to find if Windows Service is started manually or by OS?

Question

I have a Windows service which is started manually.

There is also a restart time in service which makes it to restart itself. For this I exit by giving a >0 number to OS and in the Service -> recovery tab, I have set service to restart on first, second and subsequent failures.

Environment.Exit(1)

But how to find out if service is started manually or by OS?

Answer 1

You can take it from registry :

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\YourServiceName

Registry Key: Start (REG_DWORD)

Values: 1 -> System 2 -> Automatic 3 -> Manual 4 -> Disabled

You can also do

new ServiceController("YourServiceName") 

and then do some P/Invoke fun: http://peterkellyonline.blogspot.de/2011/04/configuring-windows-service.html