I have a winform application that controls some transmitters and sound cards. There is a requirement to be able to provide a web interface for controlling those devices.
Currently I use WCF to communicate from the controllers in my asp.net MVC site to the winform app. That works well, but there is now a desire to move the hardware to another machine when needed and that means that IIS has to be installed and set-up on that machine.
I know it isn’t that hard, but I won’t be the one actually doing the moving. It will be the users. If I could host the site from the winform app them it would basically be portable besides the hardware drivers need for a usb to serial converter we use.
Can you use a windows service? The whole winforms app as a service doesn’t seem right to me. It assumes that the app is always running. I would create a windows service and expose WCF endpoints from that.