经典Windows服务或用于服务器监视服务的WCF？

Question

Currently my company uses classic Windows service that starts and runs application server. Then it uses another Windows service that monitors that service.

Now I'm given a task to build a web portal that will allow: - results of monitoring to be visual on portal; - actions to be performed from portal on service that is running application;

Considering I need two way communication where I need to: - get result whether server running service is running and in what state / a result I should get from monitoring service; - set commands to server running service such as update config, pause, stop, etc.

Now I'm thinking to move both services to WCF and provide means for these two services to communicate in between + give access to web portal for actions stated above. Web portal will be based on MVC 3.

As I don't have much experience with WCF, I'd kindly ask for some best practice tips: - is WCF good solution for this? - where should I host WCF based service? - is JSON instead of XML messaging doable?

Also, if there is any good reference book that hits on basics of WCF windows services, I'd appreciate that too. So far books I've checked online are wast and extensive, and my time is quite limited on decision to migrate to WCF or not.

Thanks :)

Answer 1

WCF is only a way to communicate between applications. Main WCF goal is transport message from source to destination . This is it. If you want to retrieve access to some data on the server, WCF is okay, is good solution. But you should understand, if you want to gather some data in real time, I mean for example, every second check server status and store somewhere this information, it's not appropriate job for WCF. WCF is a communication.