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Asked: 2026-05-11T16:24:02+00:00

I’m writing a simple accounting program consists of several C# winform clients and a

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I’m writing a simple accounting program consists of several C# winform clients and a java server app that read/write data into a database. One of the requirement is that all C# clients should receive updates from the server. For example, if user a create a new invoice from his C# client, other users should see this new invoice from their client.

My experience is mainly on web development and I don’t know what’s the best way to fulfill this requirement with C#s client and Java servlet server.

My initial though is to run ActiveMQ with Glassfish and use messaging pub/sub method so that updates can be pushed to C# client. I will create different topics like newInvoice, cancelInvoice, etc in order to differentiate the message type. Each message will simply contains the object encoded in JSON.

But it seems to me that this involves quite a lot of work. Given that my user base is very small ( just 3 or 4 concurrent user), it seems to me that there should be some simpler solutions. (I’m not familiar socket programming 🙂 )

I know this is a client-server programming 101 questions but would be great if any experienced programmer can point me to some simple solutions.

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  1. Editorial Team

    The simplest approach here is often to simply use a poll – i.e. have the clients query for data every (your time interval). That avoids a whole family of issues (firewalls, security, line-of-sight, resolution, client-tracking, etc).

    With WCF, you can have callbacks on duplex channels (allowing the server to actively send a message to clients), but this is more complex. I value simplicity, so I usually just poll.

    Tricks that help here are designing the system to have an inbuilt mechanism for querying “changes since x” – for example, an audit table, perhaps fed by database triggers. The exact details vary per project, of course.

    Another option that you might want to look at is ADO.NET Sync Services; this does much of what you ask for, for keeping a local copy of the database up to date with the server – but has a few complexities of its own. This is available (IIRC) in the “Local Database Cache” VS template.

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