Monday 24 September 2012

The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

If your Windows Service does not start and there is the following error under System folder in the Event Viewer:


The ServiceName service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

It might occur if the .NET Framework, the service uses, is not installed on the machine.

Run your service in command line mode (if it's supported) and you'll see the error saying .NET Framework X.X is not installed.

Then you will know what version you need to download and install

Hope it saved you time, that I spent on finding this out

Sunday 9 September 2012

How to change theme in VS2012

If you already upgraded to Visual Studio 2012 you must be noticed the lack of themes, except the two built-in themes: Light and Dark and menu that is all capitalized. For the last problem there is a workaroud:


  1. Run regedit.exe from command line and find the following: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General
  2. Create a DWORD value named SuppressUppercaseConversion with value 1
In order to add more color themes you can use the Visual Studio 2012 Color Themes Editor by MS:

Thanks for the first tip to  answering the following question: