My team and I are writing a .NET application to run in a Windows environment.
We will be using hardware from four-ish different vendors, that each comes with their own dll (the term is unmanaged dlls, right?). NuGet is not an option here, unfortunately.

The software will run in a production, where stability, robustness and low downtime are keywords. I have a gut feeling that running one full-blown .exe will give us issues. I think it’s due to all the third-party code that we will be integrating with, and if just one unhandled error occurs, everything fails. I recently read up on Windows services (also something called microservices) and processes. So I think my question is:

Do you have any experience and/or knowledge in this area, that could help us decide on what to do? A single .exe that can run, or services? Or multiple .exe files that each run in their own process with (something I think is called:) a guard process?

Kind regards.

We are still quite early in our development process, so we just have a barebone solution and haven’t tested anything yet.