Question: As this configuration is not supported I was wondering what alternatives people have used.

I have a universal app which currently uses a 4 tab UITabBarController on both the iPhone and iPad.

As I'd now like to use the splitviewcontroller I am faced with a design decision.

I guess I could just go with a toolbar at the top and go from there but was hoping there were more interesting techniques.

Answer: 
If you use the standard service boilerplate, but then edit `Main()`, to either:

* check `if(Environment.UserInteractive)`, or
* check the command line arguments, for example a "`-console`" switch

and change the code to run your code *directly* instead of running the standard service startup code, it should work fine.

For a full example (including self install/uninstall), see my answer [here](https://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp/browse_thread/thread/4d45e9ea5471cba4?hl=en&pli=1).

The biggest issue is allowing for the fact that your debugging runs in a different security context (the interactive user's) rather than a service account.
You're kind of on the right track when you talk about building a "helper application." You can build all the real logic of your application into a class library (dll) project, and then write a windows service that just calls the library. 

Then you can write other applications, say a console app or unit tests which reference your class library. 

That way you can write any front end application you want, and it just interfaces to the class library. That's also how you do unit tests, which would let you test most of the functionality without even really running the application... but that's really a bigger topic. :)