I have been working on many applications which run as windows service or scheduled tasks.

Now, i want to make sure that these applications will be fault tolerant and reliable. For example; i have a service that runs every hour. if the service crashes while its operating or running, i d like the application to run again for the same period, to avoid data loss. moreover, i d like the program to report the error with details. My goal is to avoid data loss and not falling behind for running the program.

I have built a class library that a user can import into a project. Library is supposed to keep information of running instance of the program, ie. program reads and writes information of running interval, running status etc. This data is stored in a database.

I was curious, if there are some best practices to make the scheduled tasks/ windows services fault tolerant and reliable.