Here is the premise:
I have a desktop that I need to be able to start up and stop applications on, but cannot get remote access to. What I had in mind is setting up a service on the machine that will start/stop a list of applications as told. This windows service will periodically pole a web service for new commands and execute them accordingly.
These are my questions.
1) Is this the easiest solution? What else would you recommend?
2) How hard is it to run an exe from a windows service? How about stopping one?
This isn’t for a project or anything, just something I am interested in implementing (mostly for fun). Any answers or even thoughts are appreciated. General discussion is also welcome (feel free to leave comments).
As for creating the Windows service itself in C#, see my post here.
The polling mechanism would work, but in general, I prefer event-driven processes instead of polling processes. You didn’t mention what version of .NET you were using, but if it is .NET 3.0/3.5, I would suggest using WCF. When the command is posted to the web service, the web service could send the command to the Windows service to be executed. Pretty straightforward. Juval Lowy, the author of Programming WCF Services, offers a bunch of WCF examples/libraries that are free to use at his website.