Hosting an ASP.NET Core 5.0 Web API in a Windows Service

One of the coolest things I've seen with the .NET ecosystem is that you can host your Web API in a windows service. In this short article, you can find the source code for the template that I have built and that you can use to power your projects up.

The template is very simple and it provides a basic skeleton for an ASP.NET Core 5.0 Web API project with hosted services and with the possibility to host the entire solution in a Windows Service. 

You can find the source code here: https://github.com/JordiCorbilla/WindowsServiceHost

The project contains the basic configuration with the latest release available of .NET (at the time of writing this post) and how to easily operate with it and start working with it.

The idea behind the project is to be able to host the end-point without requiring IIS as you might have not installed it on your server and you want something a bit more powerful and scalable.

Let me know what you think and if you have further ideas to improve the template. This one is very basic and it uses ASP.NET Core 5.0 Web API, Worker services, HTTP/HTTPS, and the swagger UI with the following packages installed:

Packages Used

<PackageReference Include="Serilog" Version="2.10.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Swashbuckle.AspNetCore" Version="5.6.3" />
<PackageReference Include="Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.Annotations" Version="5.6.3" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.WindowsServices" Version="5.0.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Serilog.AspNetCore" Version="3.4.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Serilog.Sinks.Console" Version="3.1.1" />
<PackageReference Include="Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.Swagger" Version="5.6.3" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.NewtonsoftJson" Version="5.0.0" />

The important one to mention here is the "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.WindowsServices" which is the one that will allow us to use the "UseWindowsService()" in the IHostBuilder interface.

Additional work to read:

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy/windows-service?view=aspnetcore-5.0&tabs=visual-studio
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/host/hosted-services?view=aspnetcore-5.0&tabs=visual-studio
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/host/hosted-services?view=aspnetcore-5.0&tabs=visual-studio