Question

I am struggling with a C# Website design concept.

Say I have a the need for an application that increments an integer continuously all day (simple representation of any continuous long running process). I need to write a website that would allow me (and other users) to log on, view the current value, ideally witness it updating, possibly interact with it by, say, resetting it, and then log off, leaving the process running.

Can I write this as one website, or would I have to write a website to serve pages and separate application to do the continuous work?

Answer 1

Personally I would have the “work” be some kind of Windows Service that can be interacted with (through database state, or directly through some transport mechanism, WCF, Message Queue, whatever). The website would then just talk to the existing service and do what it needs to do (get status, update etc).