Idea for worker process : Options ?

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I am writing a broker service which has two parts one which takes request from client applications and put it in a queue and there are multiple worker processes which checks this queue and if there is any work to do it will pick that piece of work and start processing. I have implemented this worker as a console application in C#. To have multiple workers I am running multiple instances of this console application.

1. Is there a better alternative to using multiple instances of console application as worker process ?
2. Can this be written as windows service ? How do I go about creating multiple workers in one service ?

Any other better way to do this ?

Posted 6-Mar-15 19:28pm

virang_21

Updated 6-Mar-15 19:29pm

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PIEBALDconsult 7-Mar-15 1:38am

Yes. And yes.
System.Threading for a start, but there are other options.

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OriginalGriff · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-06T20:17:00

Solution 1

Threading is available in all forms of C# application - and the simplest version of a thread is probably the BackgroundWorker class[^]

Have a look here: BackgroundWorker Class Sample for Beginners[^]
And here: Thread vs. BackgroundWorker[^]

Posted 6-Mar-15 20:17pm

OriginalGriff

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-06T21:10:00

Your approach sounds awfully bad. Multiple processes means considerable overhead not justified by anything; you really should prefer threads. Also, I'm not sure you should have many separate threads; threads are also should be reused, but I know too little about your goals and required operations to advice on further detail.

Why console application is bad? Because of… console. Why would you need it? It's not a problem: you can create a non-console application, without any windows at all. But do you need the process to execute when the user logs off? If the answer is "yes", you need to develop a Windows Service.

See also my past answer on development of dual-mode applications, behaving as interactive application or as the service, depending on how you host it: Configure Windows Service with UI[^].

Why doing so? Debugging! Debugging of the service is much harder, so you can move most of the debugging in interactive mode. How about this idea?

See also my past answers:
Configure Windows Service with UI[^],
Windows services Error[^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zt39148a.aspx[^],
How to install windows service programmatically[^],
How to start the application before user login to the System[^],
Automatically start my c# application when i start my computer[^].

—SA