Deploying Windows Service Fails Every Other Time

Question

I'm using Release Management 2013 to deploy a Windows service.  I go through the steps listed below to deploy it.  It fails on the first step (Delete Service) every other time.  When I run it again, it works.  It seems like it's saying
it failed, but is somehow actually succeeding.  After it fails, I don't see the service in the Services list anymore.  Then when I run the deployment again, it succeeds. 
I have found that if I manually stop the service before deploying again, it will always succeed.  There doesn't seem to be a good way of doing that in Release Management though, since the Stop Service action will error out if the service doesn't exist.
Any help would be appreciated!
==============
Delete Service
Create Folder
XCopy Site Deployment (deploys from drop folder)
Copy Config Files from Drop folder (copies config files folder from drop folder)
Delete File(s) or Folder (deletes existing config)
Rename File or Folder (renames appropriate copied config to the name of the previously deleted config file)
Delete File(s) or Folder (deletes other config files)
Delete File(s) or Folder (deletes config folder)
Create Service
Start Service

Answer 1

Hi,
You may have solved this by now, but for the record, I had the exact same issue. The problem is in this section of ManageWindowsServices.ps1
elseif ($Action -eq "delete")
#If the service exists, we first stop it to avoid "Marked for deletion" problems
$service = Get-Service -Name $ServiceName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
if ($service -ne $null)
#Stop the service
$status = & "sc.exe" "$ServerName" stop "$ServiceName"
"Stop status : $status"
$status = & "sc.exe" "$ServerName" $Action "$ServiceName"
"Delete status : $status"
#Ensure the service was deleted successfully
$service = Get-Service -Name $ServiceName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
if ($service -ne $null)
$(throw "The deletion of the service failed.")
else
$exitCode = 0
and is due to the fact that the second Get-Service call does actually return the service, even though it's after the call to delete it. Presumably this is some kind of race condition, where the call to delete the service returns before it's finished all
it's work.
In any case, the solution I went for was to rewrite this section as:
elseif ($Action -eq "delete")
[int]$returnCode = 0
#If the service exists, we first stop it to avoid "Marked for deletion" problems
$service = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -Filter "Name='$ServiceName'"
if ($service -ne $null)
#Stop the service
$status = & "sc.exe" "$ServerName" stop "$ServiceName"
"Stop status : $status"
"Deleting Service..."
$returnCode = $service.delete().ReturnValue
"Return code was : $returnCode"
if ($returnCode -ne 0)
$(throw "The deletion of the service failed: Return code was $returnCode")
#Ensure the service was deleted successfully
$service = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -Filter "Name='$ServiceName'"
if ($service -ne $null)
$(throw "The deletion of the service failed.")
else
$exitCode = 0
The above code works in all cases that I've run it for. You can either edit the existing ManageWindowsServices script, or simply create a new one. I opted for the latter.
Note: This is my first attempt at using Powershell, so there may well be a better way of doing the above.