C# 向用户显示 Windows 服务更新通知

Question

I am new to .NET and seeking help for the Windows Service Updates Notifications.

I have a use case that is somewhat similar to "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41232170/c-sharp-show-notification-prompting-a-update".

The application is developed in C#.NET and is deployed and running as Windows Service. However, the application is not using any MSI installer to install it. I am using a batch script that configures the Windows Service application.

Now, I want to show the notifications about the updates about the Windows Service to the user, when the system gets restarted.

I came across about the usage of WCF or by using the Task Scheduler, but not sure which one would be the better solution.

Please advice.

Answer 1

Ok, there are (were, because MS disabled the first one that I'm going to explain) two ways to notify your user about updates from a service.

First, the bad, ugly (and non-working in recent versions) way: interactive services.

You can configure a service as interactive , if you add the SERVICE_INTERACTIVE_PROCESS flag the service will be able to create a GUI that will be attached to Display_0. This presents a ton of problems (trying to show a GUI when there's no user session, if you have two sessions open only the first one will show the GUI and so on) but it's a cheap dirty way to show data to the user. Avoid it.

Second, the right way: a standalone GUI program.

In this case you create a secondary program that will show the data to the user, you can start it with the user session or let the user decide if he wants to receive info by opening manually this application. This program needs to receive the updates from the service in some way, which is better is up to you but I would use UDP for this, in this way your service doesn't needs to care if any GUI app is connected or not, you broadcast an UDP message and everyone listening will receive it, you don't need to mantain a server that handles connections, you don't need to have an storage in order to maintain the event data and it will support any number of instances of the GUI (if more than one user has started a session in the machine all of them will get notified).

But as I said, that would be my preference, you can do it as fancy as you want, you can use Pipes, use a file that contains the event and use a FileSystemWatcher to get notified when changes happen in it, you can even host an ASP .net web app which implements a SignalR hub and then you can create your GUI in html. It's up to you decide which mechanism is the best for your scenario.