I am doing the following, in the Service application I have a BO which will hold the list of all connected workstations and this BO will be updated OnConnect and OnDisconnect to add/remove the records, now in the Server Console application I have a list view in which I want to show the data in the Service BO, I am still not clear how to accomplish this, but here are some ideas:

1. The Server Console will also connect to the Service application with a different parameter to let it know that it is the Server Console and the service will pass a serialized BO to the Server Console to show the connected clients in the listview. Still I don't know how to do the serialization process but guess it should not be hard.
2. The Server Console can create an XML file with the connected clients and the Server Console can read this file, etc.  This approach could be more difficult to handle since I will need to have this XML file in an specific folder and also would need a timer to keep reading from each and it would be a lot of IO traffic.
3. From the Service application I could create an Instance of the Server Console application, but that would be also a bit complicated.

So, from all 3 above I would go with option 1, but before I continue further could you or somebody else comment on this or any other recommendation to handle this?

Thanks!

You will want to have a "service port" that is exposed on your service application to which the server console will connect to administrate and retrieve all information.  You can still use sockets on this, but for arguments sake, let assume that we will use port 20010 as the administration port on the service application.  When the server console fires up, it will communicated with the service on that point to obtain information...but it should not "crash" if the service is down.  In fact, if run on the same machine as the service, it should be able to start, stop, and restart he service from within the server console:

This just makes it easier for the end-user as well...especially in service call type of scenarios.  But through this port, you can do whatever you need...send serialized BOs back and forth, etc.  In all actuallity, I would probably not send a serialized BO back and forth in this case, but rather create a query type of situation where I send a request and a response, not unlike web services.  This way you can create a NetRequest class and a NetResponse class (or whatever you want to call them) that wrap this logic for you and know how to send and receive the NetStream data on both sides...so if you WANTED to send over a serialized BO you could.  For populating a list with the connected users or something that would probably be fine.  But these are just some ideas of how we designed our server service and console that might help.

Thanks for the info.  Now back to serialization, I am trying to use the SerializeToByteArray but it is not working for me, I have the feeling my code is not correct, here is  my approach:

' Serialize the BO into a ByteArray
Dim pszOutByte As System.Byte()
pszOutByte = Me.bizConnectedClients1.SerializeToByteArray

' DeSerialize the BO from a ByteArray
Dim loBO As New bizConnectedClients
BusinessLayer.DeserializeBusinessObject(e.TextB)
Me.BizConnectedClients1.CopyDataFrom(loBO, BusinessCloneDataType.ClearAndFillFromDefaultView)
loBO.Dispose()

In above code e.TextB contain the serialized BO byte stream. When testing this I get the following error when trying to Deserialize the BO:

SerializationException
  The input stream is not a valid binary format. The starting contents (in bytes) are: 34-31-36-32-32-34-36-33-0D-0A-54-65-73-74-20-4F-6E ...
Source     : System.Windows.Forms
Stack Trace: 
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.EndInvoke(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
   at nsoftware.IPWorks.Ipport.nsoftware.core.IIpportEvents.FireDataIn(Byte[] text, Boolean EOL)

What is it that I am missing here?

And you will need to type is as well.  So it would look more like this:

Just a note to say thanks again.  So far I was able to create my version of a Server Console and a Server Service using the IP*Works library from www.nsoftware.com and the book for Windows Services suggested by Greg in this thread.

This has been a great experience working outside of just the database process, using secured XML files managed by the SF Business Object to store the Server Settings information and using a ListView with all the goodies of the SF BO to show connected clients without saving any data to a database, this whole process shows once again the power in the SF framework.

On a side note, I was having a lot of trouble with the IP*Works and sending the BO as a byte array, despite Trent's support replies I could not make it work to a satisfactory level, so I decided to simply use a predefined string which I then parsed and it worked just great.

Thanks guys!

We do allow it if the server cannot be automatically located.  We use a UDP boradcast from the client if it cannot connect t the server.  The server is listening on that UDP port and sends out a UDP broadcast of its location to which the client will retrieve the servers location and login.  You can find a lot of samples on the internet about this.  I did a quick serach and found some CodeProject samples.  Here is a chart sample that uses a UDP broadcast.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/socketsincs.aspx?fid=2956&df=90&mpp=25&noise=3&sort=Position&view=Quick&select=1070795