Share data between Windows Service and Cassini-dev running in the same process

Question

I have a Windows Service written in C#. I have recently added CassiniDev to it to allow remote web administration and monitoring of the service. The integration went really well except for my inability to interact with data layer of my Windows Service from hosted ASP.NET pages.

I have tried putting everything of interest into a common assembly but the debugger shows there are two loaded assemblies with the same name but from different paths. Cassini runs ASP.NET off some temp folder so the assembly I am using is really "a different instance" in the address space of the same process.

I am not sure what is going on here. Probably some "application domain" separation stuff that I do not understand at this time.

So with Windows Service and the web server running in the same process, how can I make them interact? Say I have some status in the Service part that I want to report in the ASP.NET part. Any ideas how I could make this happen? Shared memory or TCP comes to mind but it sounds like an overkill for purely intra-process communication.

Answer 1

If security isn't an immediate concern, i.e. the data isn't highly sensitive and in a controlled environment, then you could have success using Named Pipes. A managed API for processing piping has been implemented as part of the framework, so you don't need to think in native calls.