CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#vb.netarchitecturewindows-services
youwhut
youwhut

Reputation: 948

.NET Windows Service - Architectural Decisions

I currently have a Windows Service which continually runs throughout the day. It has multiple threads which kick off:

The tasks are not the important part of this question but it gives you the idea that this Windows service has grown to be a monster. It manages the imports of somewhere in the region of 300 million records per day.

It is hectic, but it works.

This iteration of development is giving me a chance to review the service and possibly break it down so that it is more manageable. It is thought that this could be multiple services with one manager service - ideal if a component needs to be updated then the whole thing does not need to grind to a hault.

Does anyone have any experience with this? I am keen to hear about your approach because it is new territory for me.

I have read this SO post which touches on the topic.

Cheers.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1602

Answers (3)

Doobi
Doobi

Reputation: 4842

I've done something similar for our background services, there's basically a ServiceHost and "Servlets" which are loaded via appdomains so they don't impact each other.

Upvotes: 1

TomTom
TomTom

Reputation: 62157

Why a service? Pretty much none of the things you do- except the 24/7 task for imports - are something I would do as a service.

I would use:

  • Either command line programs that get regularly scheduled, especially on the daily / weekly tasks
  • Or use SSIS and SQL Scheduler to schedule something.

The only thing that may justify a service is the 24/7 XML import - unless you can get away starting it, for example, every 5 minutes.

Upvotes: 0

Scoregraphic
Scoregraphic

Reputation: 7210

Your description sounds a lot like the thing I wrote about 2 years ago. A windows service which hosts addins and runs them in multithreaded environment. The architecture used is the .NET addin pipeline introduced in .NET 3.5 (System.AddIn-namespace). It works like a charm as I also integrated live/hot updates. It's so easy to implement new addins and just plug them in whenever I like. So I really recommend using this addin stuff.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc175292.aspx for a quickstart.

Upvotes: 4

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