I’m trying to get started with an application that definitely requires some GUI for configuration management and the application has to poll a web service about every hour (to check for updates/messages) or so. Also, the application is expected to run constantly in the background/system tray.
I’m looking for some guidance on the overall architecture for this application design. Can this be a straight up WPF app or would it be better it is a windows service because of the polling and because it is expected for the application to be running all the time? Do you guys have any suggestions?
Firstly, services tend not to have a GUI. They can, but it’s not advised.
What I would do, is have two applications. The service itself which performs the monitoring in question, and a user-interface application (that runs on startup), and provides an interface to the service. Communication between the two can be handled in a variety of ways.
The advantage to this is, your service will run even if there isn’t a user logged on, and the UI part is present only when a user is on.