Question

C# service - communicating with service controller app

Asked by: lucidity_99

Hi,

I have an app I wrote in VB a while back that I kludged into running
as a service with srvany.  I'm now re-writing this app in C# to make
it a genuine service that's more stable and has increased
functionality.

I've written the service and the controller app, and I can start/stop
the service, etc. with no problems.

My question is this:  is it possible for my service and my controller
app to communicate?  My old application had a listbox on the main form
that showed progress notifications, etc.  I would like to mimic this
behaviour, but I don't really know where to begin with passing strings
from the service to the controller application.

Can someone point me in the right direction for this?

Thanks so much!

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Asked On
2004-04-19 at 08:19:56ID20959170
Tags

service

Topic

C# Programming Language

Participating Experts
2
Points
250
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: NetPointerPosted on 2004-04-19 at 10:53:07ID: 10861891

Remoting ???

 

by: vancouver_jonesPosted on 2004-04-19 at 13:16:47ID: 10863150

So as I understand your question you have the following setup:

-An GUI Controller app running on the user desktop that is able to start/stop, etc... your Windows Service.
-A Windows Service running on the Windows Service Desktop.

And you would like to figure out a better way to communicate with your service from the user desktop.

If I remember right, a Windows Service Process cannot communicate directly with a process running on the User's desktop because the Windows Service Process is running in a seperate hidden non-gui window station. However, both the service and the front-end app share the same file system. One way that you could try to enable communication from your Service to your Controller app is to have a file somewhere that both the Service and Controller knows about. The Service modifies this file as it runs to update it with whatever changes and metadata you wish. The Controller app would then need to use FileSystemWatcher (under the System.IO namespace) class to monitor that file for changes. When a change happens, you go and read the file and have the Controller app do whatever it needs to. You will probably have to lock the file for reading and writing and have your Service and Controller wait while the file is in use by its counterpart to prevent weird syncronization problems. To have the Controller communicate with the Service, just use another file and have the Service watch for changes in it.

To do it other ways, you may need to go into unmanaged APIs. Look up "Windows Services" and "Window Stations" to learn more about how.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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