Interprocess Communication / Broadcast

Question

I have a Windows Service (implemented in C#) and I have something like a service control manager. I would like to trace messages from the service to the service control manager (which is a window forms application), but I'm not sure what's the best way for doing this. The service should broadcast the messages to all clients who are listning in a nonblocking manner.

I have considerd using named pipes or mailslots, but i'm not sure if there is a better way for doing this (I'm also not sure if I can implement the broadcating with this technology).

Any advice would be greatly apreciated.

Answer 1

If there are multiple clients listening, I think named pipes would be a little more work. I think shared memory would be simpler for that situation. If the clients might be on a separate machine, something like multicast might be a simple way to transmit the information if there is not a lot of data involved. However, multicast range is typically limited to a single subnet unless the routers are specifically configured for multicast.