How to control settings of Windows Service from GUI?

Question

I have this Windows Service that communicates with TCP/IP.
What I want to know is a method for a Windows Form Application to able to modify the setting of this service, such as remote host address and port to connect, timeout length, and log settings.

I have researched about NamedPipe, WCF Service, and IPC, but I can't decide what matches my scenario the best.
Will be nice to able to change the service settings by doing something like this from the client side.

[Service].SetTimeout(3000);

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If you want that kind of programmatic control, then WCF is your best bet. With WCF, you get to define the API yourself, eg, what methods to call, what messages to pass, etc. The WCF framework takes care of exchanging the data for you. And with the WCF config files, changing the back-end data exchange mechanism is trivial. For example, you could replace a NetNamedPipeBinding used for same-machine communication with a NetTcpBinding for cross-machine communication simply by modifying the config file(s). Full disclosure, though, if you haven't done WCF before, my experience was that the barrier to entry was pretty high. Of course, I took my lumps with Visual Studio 2008. It might be much easier in a more recent version. Here's an answer I gave a while back with some tutorials that helped me.

For me personally, I've replaced the early WCF implementation with a TCP-based version over localhost in the project I work on. The front-end application receives constant information from the Windows service when things are "running," and at the time of our decision, WCF streaming was not documented very well. We also saw evidence of problems, although that might simply be because we did it wrong. In any case, I'm very pleased with the solution we've come up with.

I can't speak to named pipes directly, but from what I've read, they're easy to use.

HTH.