title: Advantages of running an application as a service
body: <p>Sometimes I see that some applications allow themselves to be run as a service on Windows, for example <em>Apache HTTP Server</em> <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/win_service.html" rel="noreferrer">allows that</a>.  I always ran it as a regular application and never experienced any problems or limitations.  </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>What are the advantages of this?  </li>
  <li>Is there anything that applications is allowed to do or have when it's run as a service?  </li>
  <li>What are the advantages for me as a developer, when I write a service vs. a regular application.</li>
  </ul>