I have installed a Windows service developed in c#. The service has been installed by an msi package created by a visual studio installer project. When the service is installed with binaries coming from a release build it fails to start and the service console returns the following error message:"Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion". When the service is installed with debug binaries everything works as expected. I have added logs for every exception that occurs in the service's constructor, in the OnStart method, in the main method, and in the DoWork method of the main working thread of the service. The OnStart method of the service exits almost immediatly as it just initializes some variables from the configuration file and then starts the main working thread. I get no exception logged on the event viewer. I am clueless, how could I debug what is happening with the release binaries? Thanks.
You can try to remove MSI from the process so as to better identify the root cause.
Try to start this service and see if the same error message occurs.
It the service still fails to start, try to follow KB to set up service debugging,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824344
As this is a .NET Windows service, you might learn about WinDbg and SOS,
http://www.netfxharmonics.com/2009/01/Learning-WinDBGSOS-and-Advanced-Debugging