Start/Stop service with wait

[ASolovey]

Hi,

We'd like to control service during build procedure.
We need to stop it AND WAIT UNTIL it starts,
then we need to start it AND WAIT UNTIL it stops.

I don't see now how to do that.
The timeout option of "service" step doesn't do that.
It seems that this step simply waits this "timeout" checking the service to BEGIN DOING THE ACTION rather than wait for its completion.

The behavior is this:
We stop the service with timeout=15 sec, the service doesn't stop within this timeframe, but step succeeds immediately without any wait. Then we're trying to start the service and it of course says that the service is already running with no fail (noticed that latter is by design).

Could you please advise us:
1) How to wait until the service really completed the action?
2) how to check the state of the service and perform some other steps conditionally depending on its state?

Thanks!
P.S. We're using VBP 7.1