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With .Net what is the best way to interact with a service (i.e. how do most tray-apps communicate with their servers). It would be preferred if this method would be cross-platform as well (working in Mono, so I guess remoting is out?)
Forgot to mention, we still have to support Windows 2000 machines in the field, so WCF and anything above .Net 2.0 won't fly.
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Right-click the service name, and select Properties. The Service Properties window is displayed. Select the Log On tab. Select Local System account and then select Allow service to interact with desktop.
To do this, what you want to do is write your Windows service and a front-end Windows application. To provide the communication bridge between the two, I would strongly recommend using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). To create a C# Windows service, you can follow the step-by-step instructions here.
If you allow the service to interact with the desktop, any information that the service displays on the desktop will also be displayed on an interactive user's desktop. A malicious user could then take control of the service or attack it from the interactive desktop."
Microsoft Windows services, formerly known as NT services, enable you to create long-running executable applications that run in their own Windows sessions. These services can be automatically started when the computer boots, can be paused and restarted, and do not show any user interface.
Be aware that if you are planning to eventually deploy on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, many ways that this can be done today will not work. This is because of the introduction of a new security feature called "Session 0 Isolation".
Most windows services have been moved to run in Session 0 now in order to properly isolate them from the rest of the system. An extension of this is that the first user to login to the system no longer is placed in Session #0, they are placed in Session 1. And hence, the isolation will break code that does certain types of communication between services and desktop applications.
The best way to write code today that will work on Vista and Server 2008 going forward when doing communication between services and applications is to use a proper cross-process API like RPC, Named Pipes, etc. Do not use SendMessage/PostMessage as that will fail under Session 0 Isolation.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/vista/services.mspx
Now, given your requirements, you are going to be in a bit of a pickle. For the cross-platform concerns, I'm not sure if Remoting would be supported. You may have to drop down and go all the way back to sockets: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.sockets.aspx
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