Design pattern for windows service - c#

Question

I am getting my feet wet with programming and my self learning brings me to this question. I have been reading about design patterns and wanted to know what a good recommendation for this would be.

My test application sends a message to MSMQ. I want to write a windows service which will listen to this MSMQ and for every message it receives, I want it to perform a simple database insert.

I looked at this articlelink text

which gave me some information i needed. In the example I could do most of my work within

 private static void MyReceiveCompleted(Object source, 
        ReceiveCompletedEventArgs asyncResult)
    {
        // Connect to the queue.
        MessageQueue mq = (MessageQueue)source;

        // End the asynchronous Receive operation.
        Message m = mq.EndReceive(asyncResult.AsyncResult);

        // Display message information on the screen.
        Console.WriteLine("Message: " + (string)m.Body);

        // Restart the asynchronous Receive operation.
        mq.BeginReceive();

        return; 
    }

But is there a specific pattern that is more viable candidate? From reading around I assume it could be the 'command' pattern but I am not sure if this is the best pattern. Any ideas or thoughts to help me get a better understanding of the patterns.

Books I read on patterns: Head First Design patterns - i know mixed reviews on this ordered a used copy of design patterns by gang of four(sp?)

Answer 1

This is not directly related to your question, but a key design pattern to developing services of any kind (web services, windows services, etc) is to seperate your functionality from the service host.

That is, have a class that actually performs the work. And have a service that calls the class.

This way you can re-host the service easily in multiple hosts, and have an easy way to test the functionality via console apps, winforms apps, or unit tests.