I'm currently challenged with a Windows Service that I need to create... This is my forum posting:
I am planning a new windows service and I need some Ideas. I want to create a service which is going to do alot of complex calculations. Some of these will be automatically billing clients, sending email notifications on account status and account changes of clients, account validation etc etc etc.
The first thing I'd want to do is validation. When new clients sign up, account validations will run against a user and let them know if there's anything wrong via email. These validations gets setup through alot of govermental rules, which we as a company must abide to.
I want to have a service, which will run these processes, but when a new rule becomes available, I want to be able to change these values (rules) without having to hard code it into the service, recompiling and reinstalling it on our server, but then again, I need the data which it uses to validate to be fast, as this code will have to do numerous processes per record (send mails, do validations) and do this for about 100 000 or more records, in not more than 10 minutes. as this service will be scheduled to run each 15 minutes, and check for new data. The validation rules and govermental information is stored in a txt file which we get from our goverment.
am I approaching it the right way with the following scenario:
#1: Create a windows service which will do the actual processes.
#2: When the service runs, get all the information from the txt file, and place it in a dataset in memory, thus improving performance.
#3: For validation rules, store the rules in some kind of file in the service, which will be updatable without using a sql server or a database solution, as this data will mostly stay static and ocationally change. (This I need more help on, this will be the core)
#4: Some of these validation rules I'd like to make available through a web service to clients. Would it be best to compile all this in a dll, and the dll gets it's data from a local source, and then have the web service refer to the dll, or the windows service to get information?
Lastly:
#5: How wil I be able to have a windows service running and be able to refer to functions on this service on our current applications, which run on the server?
#6: I'd have to build in some extensive security into this application for users to use functions and variables based on credentials from a database... That's kinda mind boggling aswell.
All inputs will be greatly appreciated.
Hectic Isn't it? I'm gonna plan this thing through alot before I start digging in. Has anyone got some nice ideas for it?