Windows Service and Windows Store

Question

I’m working on a Windows Desktop application composed of a Windows service and a separate UI. I’m wondering if it would be possible to distribute this application though the Windows Store ? (Will it be possible to install the windows service ?) Or should I use something else for background heavy processing ?

Answer 1

Or should I use something else for background heavy processing ?

To me this sounds a like wrong place for a service. A service is a task that can be done completely without a UI and does its work mainly without user interaction. What you describe sounds like you want your service to interact with your application. In that case, it might be better to just put the computation intensive tasks in a background thread.

The key question is are there any scenarios where the background processing should run without the UI? If so, a service is a good idea, if not, a service is just wrong.

The big disadvantage of seperating an application into multiple processes such as a desktop application + service is that you are tight to use inter-process communication such as shared files, named pipes or web services. Intra-process communication between an application and its worker thread is much easier, because you can just use shared memory.

would be possible to distribute this application though the Windows Store ?

The Windows Store only allows to install immersive apps directly. Desktop apps are only linked.