Nine months ago I blogged about my curiosity about the D programming language. It is possible that this curiosity is turning into a hobby. Time will tell. Recently I decided to create a Windows Service written in the D programming language. I’ll share my journey to that end here.

When I started I assumed it would be easy to find examples in the open source world from which I could learn. That assumption turned out to be mostly false. I found some posts on the forum that were helpful. I then dug up an email address using that famously free detective, Google. Graham Fawcett was very helpful in sharing some code with me but for some reason I could not get it to work.

After a week or more of evenings attempting to find a solution, I gave up and offered a bounty on the forum. And Vladimir Panteleev, a regular D community contributor, came to my rescue and gladly took the $100 bounty to be applied toward other issues he would like to see resolved. My deep thanks to both of these community members.

As it turns out, the code that Graham shared with me would have worked except the Win32 bindings code had an x64 bug that would not have manifested itself had I been compiling for x86. Specifically, the winsvc.d code file contained the line:

alias DWORD SERVICE_STATUS_HANDLE;

I took Vladimir’s advice and changed it to:

alias size_t SERVICE_STATUS_HANDLE;

And then later pulled in his final fix as;

mixin DECLARE_HANDLE!("SERVICE_STATUS_HANDLE");

I won’t try to explain the differences here. In any case, the handle in x64 world needed to be a ulong and it was getting declared as a uint (C# equivalents here). And once that was resolved, I was very happy to see the code work.

You can get or read the code for that first success on GitHub. I refactored that code using a reference app in C++ that followed a familiar pattern having written many Windows Service in C#, even to the point of writing a short cut to standing up a Windows Service in .NET.

In any case, if you are curious to see my first real foray into the world of D programming, you can check out the code on GitHub. It even includes a minor improvement suggested by a forum member already. And if you have questions or need help, please leave a comment and I will do my best to help.