Hello Tom!
I know svcinst is such an easy tool to use (which is what makes it great). But if the SDP is moving towards using scripts, powershell, etc... I point out that powershell has the cmdlet "New-Service". Might be more appropriate to move in that direction for the SDP purposes?

Hi, Ryan!

Well, this particular update isn't driven by the usage of installing the p4d service. Of course the SDP uses svcinst.exe for that purpose today, so it wouldn't hurt to use a newer svcinst.exe. I would have no problem having that part of the svcinst.exe usage replaced with PowerShell functions if they're equivalent (though I'd want Engineering to confirm that. @brett?

This update was driven by a need a a request from Engineering (per SDP-517) to make the SDP promote usage of svsinst.exe in the SDP as the best way to shutdown the p4d service. This is just a step in that direction. The challenge is that the Windows Services applet (and 'net stop p4_N') don't guarantee a graceful shutdown on Windows, and they can return before the service is well and truly shutdown. I'm not certain, but I suspect the PowerShell applets access the standard process management mechanism, and thus wouldn't give us the reliability guarantee we can get with svcinst.exe. (FYI, I'm also updating the training content to promote using svcinst.exe as well).

I don't have the details worked out, but I figure the Stop-LiveService call in SDP-functions.ps1 will be modified to call svcinst.exe to shutdown the server. And we'll probably need to add a simple wrapper for admins to call to shutdown the server. Ditto for startup, but in that case it's just for consistency rather than safety.

See: https://swarm.workshop.perforce.com/projects/perforce-software-sdp/jobs/SDP-517