Question

Scenario:

• Read files from different servers. Each server provide files with different format, extension and data.
• The reading process is periodically different for each server (per minute, hour, weekly, monthly).
• There should be config file (or whatever) to set the configuration related to “File format”, “File extension”, “Server credentials”.

---

My Implementation:

I wrote an application to read these different files depending on configuration set as follow:

interface IServer
{
    // Common implementation
}

[ServerPath("anyLocation")]
[FileDelimiter(",")]
[FileSearchPattern("*.txt")]
class Server2 : IServer
{
    // Specific implementation
}

[ServerPath("anyLocation")]
[FileDelimiter("|")]
[FileSearchPattern("*.csv")]
class Server1 : IServer
{
    // Specific implementation
}

Questions:

• Should I use a windows service to run this app?
• The settings I set as attributes should exists as settings accessible to the user, How to do?
• Most importantly, I don’t know if I should use a separate service for each server, taking into consideration that reading time may interfere (what happen in that case?). I still prefer to have a single service.

Answer 1

I wouldn’t create a windows service for this kind of problem.

Create a simple console application that accepts a commend line parameter to specify the desired target (server) and read the according configuration from a simple App.config instead of hardcoding it into your app.

Run your console app useing Scheduled Tasks – this will give you fine grained scheduling control, built in monitoring and error tracking without any additional code.