Single windows service to provide access to cached data?

Question

I need a solution where I have a single windows service providing access to cached data to various consumers: To an MVC web application, a .Net Assembly (COM interop) used within an classic ASP page, other windows services, a windows forms application. So the data must be accessible from various processes. The data being cached is read-only. For now, all processes are located on the same machine. The environment is .net framework 3.5 and c#.

My question is, how can multiple appdomains/processes retrieve cached data from a single windows service?

Answer 1

I would look into hosting a WCF endpoint on the windows service. That way pretty much anything should be able to communicate with it.

An other thing you may want to have a look at is Windows Server AppFabric Cache. It would easily allow your service to use multiple servers if you find the need to scale out. However, that, I think, is only accessible via managed code (.NET).