worker-services

Guidance for building long-running .NET background services, such as scheduled workers, queue processors, and system daemons.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create hosted workers with BackgroundService, process queues, schedule tasks, add health checks, support graceful shutdown, and host services on Windows.
Why use it?
It helps workers start and stop correctly, handle cancellation, manage configuration and logging, and use scoped services safely.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/managedcode/dotnet-skills/worker-services
Any agent
npx skills add managedcode/dotnet-skills --skill worker-services
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/managedcode/dotnet-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 109 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,873 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00109 $0.02873
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.01437
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00575
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00287

Measured yesterday against content hash 90b0dc050014, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

worker-services scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

catalog/Frameworks/Worker-Services/skills/worker-services/SKILL.md · 399 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 399 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

.NET Worker Services

Trigger On

  • building long-running background services or scheduled workers
  • adding hosted services to an app or extracting them into a worker process
  • reviewing graceful shutdown, cancellation, queue processing, or health behavior

Documentation

References

  • patterns.md - BackgroundService patterns, graceful shutdown, and health check implementations
  • anti-patterns.md - Common worker service mistakes and how to avoid them

Workflow

  1. Use BackgroundService as your base class:

    • Provides standard StartAsync/StopAsync handling
    • Focus on implementing ExecuteAsync only
    • Proper cancellation token management built-in
  2. Handle scoped dependencies correctly:

    • Create service scopes for scoped services
    • No scope is created by default in hosted services
  3. Implement graceful shutdown:

    • Propagate cancellation tokens throughout
    • Complete work promptly when token fires
    • Avoid ungraceful shutdown at timeout
  4. Keep execution loop thin:

    • Move business logic to testable services
    • Handle exceptions to prevent service crashes
    • Use PeriodicTimer for scheduled work
  5. Add observability:

    • Use health checks for readiness/liveness
    • Expose metrics and structured logging
    • Consider distributed locks for multi-instance

Read the full file on GitHub · 399 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 399 lines · 109 tokens per session scan A 90b0dc050014

Subscribe to this mod's changes

worker-services is a skill published in the GitHub repository managedcode/dotnet-skills (477 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 109 tokens to every session and 2,873 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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