I have a system with the following components:
Process A - A console app that acts as a service - Services clients through WCF
Process B - A console app that acts as a service - Services clients through WCF
Process C - A small WInForm app that acts as a service - Services clients through WCF
Though we can start each of the above processes individually by double clicking but we decided to have another Process "Service Manager" that hides the individual UI's and starts all the processes above and shows a kind of consolidated UI. The communication between the Service Manager Process and the different processes is right now done through TCP but we can move that to WCF anytime we wish. Before anybody asks, so TCP was initially used for "Mono" but that is not on the cards right now.
Now when Process A is started from the ServiceManager, lets say Process A is performing a time consuming task, since it does not have its own UI, so Service Manager needs to show a progress bar for the Process A task.
In Process A i have every information to show a deterministic progress bar, but how do i send that data over to the Service Manager. Like "Step 1 of 1000" etc.
Is there a recommended "Design Pattern" or any ideas that i can start with. Every process started from the Service Manager needs to use the same code for sending any progress task data over to the Service Manager(basically implement some interface). Every Process has its own progress bar on the Service Manager UI.
.Net 3.5
used Language C#
Thanks