accessing a object from a windows application running in the system tray

Question

I want to have one application running in the system tray managing the communication between the client / server and login's to the server. Then I want to have multiple c# applications access a class inside the application running in the system tray. When the calling windows application calls the system tray application - the system tray should start up if it is not running.

Tech Note:
1. all applications are using c# 3.5 2. This was very easy with VB activeX EXE - not sure how to do it with C#

Answer 1

In VB you would have been using DCOM to provide interprocess communications.

The easiest way in .NET is likely to be: expose a WCF service (easy enough to self host a WCF server: use the ServiceHost class) and have the client's connect to that.