Question

My team is writing a windows service which needs to poll data from a 3rd party system (the 3rd party system provides a web service which we use).
The process will look something like this:
1. Call the 3rd party WS
2. Save the recieved raw data to our DB
3. Process the raw data
4. Save the processed data to our DB
5. Repeat

The team agrees that we actually have 2 different logical operations:
1. Getting and saving the raw data
2. Processing the raw data and saving the results

We are trying to decide which of the following design options is better:
Option 1: Perform both operation on the same windows service, each operation on it’s own thread
Option 2: Perform the first operation on the windows service, and async/one-way call a wcf service for the second operation

In your opinion, which option is better?
if you have another alternative you think is better, please share it.

Thanks.

Answer 1

According to your comment, I would say that you have a thread that once a second polls the 3rd party service and starts two tasks.

Task 1 would store the raw data to database.
Task 2 would process the raw data and store the result in database.

If the polling thread retrieves 1000 entries it should poll again without delay.

You can either use System.Threading.ThreadPool or System.Threading.Tasks.Task.