How to shutdown VB.net (Windows Service) without data loss?

[VBQ]

Hi All,

I'm a starting VB.net programmer and have found a lot of usefull tips on this website, thanks for that!
So maybe somebody can give me some advise on my challenge.

I wrote a Console Application in VB.net 2005 Express which gets data from a MySQL-database and converts it to several CSV-files. It marks the data that has been converted to CSV-file and finally moves the data from a temporary directory to a final directory where it is processed by another application.
As a standard Console Application it works fine at a single trigger.

Now the application must run once every 15 minutes even if nobody has logged on to the server (2003).

So I want to convert the application to a Windows Service, for this I followed a small tutorial on dotheweb.net.
But now I have a question about shutting down the application.

How can I guarantee that when the service stops, my program finishes? If the application stops before updating the table but created allready the files I could have incomplete data!

Do I have to work with threads, or are there any other solutions?
Or should I use the taskscheduler? What happens here when the application is forced to stop?

Thank you.

VBQ

[Shashi Sadasivan]

A windows service has events called starting, stopping
You should be able to code your requirements in the stopping event
You can cancel the stopping of the service if your program has not yet finished processing.

However in an event of a power failure, im not sure what this would do.

[VBQ]

A windows service has events called starting, stopping
You should be able to code your requirements in the stopping event
You can cancel the stopping of the service if your program has not yet finished processing.

However in an event of a power failure, im not sure what this would do.

Shashi, thanks for your reply.

How do I cancel stopping? Are there examples available as far as you know?
And in what can I determine that my program is still running? I could use a variable for this, but I think there must be a better way, like threads?

Good point about power failure, but I don't really fear a power failure, because I use a smart UPS. But I will keep this in mind!