How to control a C# Program from the web? Using AJAX maybe?

Question

Hello. Can anyone explain how to send variables from the web (PHP, Javascript, etc.) to a C# program? I want to allow the web to tell the program what to do. Maybe I could use AJAX to send data to an auto-updating page, which the C# program can then read? That would also allow users to be logged-in to the page and therefore different data could be sent to each user. Could someone explain how this could be done?

Answer 1

Why not just have it listen for commands on a socket?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.sockets.socket.listen.aspx

Answer 2

Well this might be tricky because of the concurrency on the calls to the C# programm.

You could create a Webservice that is starting the C# program with the variables as arguments.

Or you might write the variables into a table and have the C# program poll for new entries to that table. This would overcome the concurrency issue. Combined with a WebService that writes the variables into the a table - this solution is working just fine.

Answer 3

You could build a webservice in .NET. The best way to do so is with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Then you could write code in your javascript to make calls to the webservice.

Answer 4

You have two solutions here :

• Build a WCF service that you'll then use by doing SOAP calls
• Use a Socket to communicate