C# Traditional Server with WCF Web Service

Question

I am creating a client application that downloads and displays market data from Yahoo! for a university project, but that also sends out notifications to mobiles (so far using Google cloud messaging). So far it's a WPF client and the "server" is a class library - so far working. What I was wondering, is can you mix this server with a WCF service - the WCF service I was planning on using for registering devices, as well as accepting and parsing commands.

So I would call .Start() on my server object, and it will be constantly running in the background, while a WCF REST service runs alongside it - or would I be better simply having a thread running on the server that can accept input... sorry if this is confusing, but just wondering if it can, or has been done before or any advice. :)

Just to explain a bit better

The client front end and the "server" are running on the same machine - I was calling it a server because it is not only updating the front end, but sending out GCM notifications at the same time. I was wondering if maybe a WCF service could be added to make it simpler to handle adding devices to a database ("server" reads a list of device reg ids from a database, sends notifications to these) by allowing an android app to details via REST or something similiar

Answer 1

I would explore wrapping the class library in a Windows Service (which is essentially a process that runs continuously, and can be stopped/started/paused) and keep your WCF service as a web service for client communication.

How the WCF client service communicates with the Windows service is up to you - whether you store the data in a shared database, keep it in memory and have another WCF layer communicating between the two, etc. A shared database would be the most straightforward, especially if you want to persist the data for use by other apps/services as well.