I spend a lot of time writing windows services. If I had to install every one I worked on locally, my box would be terribly tired and a mess to boot.

Here is a way to  start a service in a console window without installing it on your box. Use this code in your Main. You will have to add the string[] args parameter if you do not have it.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
     //Start IOC Container Structuremap
     //http://structuremap.net/structuremap/
     _bootStrapper = new IocContainerBootstrapper();
     _bootStrapper.BootstrapStructureMap();

     //This configurator starts up log4net
     XmlConfigurator.Configure();

     Log.DebugFormat("The SweetService service bootstrapped '{0}':", ObjectFactory.WhatDoIHave());

     //Add '/console' to start options > Command Line Arguments in
     //your project properties
     //to get the service to start in console for debugging
     if (args.Length > 0 && args[0] == "/console")
     {
          Log.Debug("Starting this sweet service in Console mode for debugging");
          SweetService myService = new SweetService();
          myService.OnStart(args);
          Console.ReadKey();
     }
     else
     {
          ServiceBase[] servicesToRun = new ServiceBase[]
          { new SweetService() };
          Run(servicesToRun);
     }
}

Put  ‘console’ in your Start Options / Command line arguments in your visual studio project properties and set your project type to Console Application.

When you start the project now in a debugger, you will get a lovely console window with all your log4net output and you never had to install the service to work on it.

For this example, I am using log4net and I am using a colored console appender.  That makes the output in the console window great.

Enjoy,

Jim