Polling Long Running Windows Service from ASP.NET

Question

We have an application that uses Lucene.NET within a windows service to reindex our app for search. Our admin section can trigger a full reindex in Lucene, and currently the only way to review its progress is through a log file written to disc.

This is clunky. We'd like to poll the service to determine the reindexing progress.

Does anyone have any insight into this?

Answer 1

Named pipes would be the way I would do cross process communication in this instance, if both processes would be running on the same machine.

If both processes are on different machines, it gets hairier and will probably involve something along the lines of a web service communicating with the process and then asp.net calling the web service.