Communication Between Service and Form Application

Question

Would any kindly tell me if its possible to communicate between a service and a form application. For example retrieve information from the service like current activity or progress of its operations. In particular I would like to to monitor more than just whether a service is running. In the system tray I would like to display whether the service is idle or running a particular method. Is this possible? If so should I be using MSMQ or something else?

spgilmore · Answer

This is possible and as you probably suspect a common task when working with services. Because they have no interface services often include an interface for a windowed program to interact with them. 95% of the time this is done with a built-in socket server. It's easy enough to do with the Indy components ( http://www.nevrona.com/indy ) but you can do it with the built-in socket objects as well. You may find other IPC methods acceptable as well such as named or anonymous pipes and mailslots. Sockets are just as easy (or easier) and work from remote machines and have less overhead the the others. The other methods are not yet ported to .NET. You'd probably have to P-Invoke to use them. When you only need to READ the status of the service a database can often be the best way. The service can write to the database at its leisure and the windowed program can read at its leisure.