Service -> App Communication. Best method?

Question

Hi,

I'm developing some kind of server service who gets in action and stop on an specific range of time, I need to write a monitoring app to receive some status text sent from the service in the same local host.

It's the first time I need to comm between processes, I've been looking for some methods, wich do you believe is the best for this case? why? pros and cons for each one?

• Remoting
• Named pipes
• Windows messages
• local tcp connection
• Database table log (I'm using a database so it's another option)
• Datafile on disk

Edit: I'm using .net 2 so the great wcf solution doesn't work for me :(

Answer 1

See this SO question:

C# IPC Best Practises

You almost certainly want to use WCF. This replaces other .Net technologies such as remoting. Also, if you use WCF:

• Other clients could also subscribe to that status information in the future.
• The service listening to status updates could be run on another physical box if you needed to scale out.

Answer 2

If you're really just looking for "status messages" - as opposed to an actual client app - then you can use Trace/Debug.Write* statements. DebugView will pick them up if it's running, and can also be used across hosts. And, of course, you can add other listeners via config file if you later wanted to save the messages.