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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T20:30:33+00:00

I’m working on an application which I think would be better suited to being

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I’m working on an application which I think would be better suited to being a Windows service. The only issue I have come up against in planning to convert it is that it has a window which displays activity. Now I know it’s bad practice (and deprecated in Win7) to show a GUI from a service so my question is, what is the best way to show progress?

My first idea was a polling method using RPC and MIDL but an operation could start and finish in a second or two it would be very inaccurate to using polling.

What are my other options for this?

Thanks,
J

EDIT: My question is more about the communication method, I plan to split it into the service and a task tray icon but I want to display a window with progress bars to show the progress of tasks running in the service but polling would be too slow unless it was sub-second which seems a waste, is there a way to push progress to the task tray app?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Create a service that does the work, and an optional GUI application that, if running, sits in the system tray and allows you to open a window watching the progress. You can communicate the progress over e.g. shared memory or named pipes – but remember that the service is running while noone is logged in, so it should in no way depend on being able to display progress.

    Push mechanisms:

    • Shared memory, a mutex and an event (CreateEvent). Use the PulseEvent call whenever the service updates state, have the systray app wait on the event (with e.g. MsgWaitForMultipleObjects)
    • Named pipes (CreateNamedPipe) – These are also waitable for the systray app
    • TCP/UDP – avoid this, you’ll just run into overeager firewalls that don’t understand the concept of localhost
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