read process trace information

[Mike G]

Greetings,

I hope this is an appropriate place to ask this. I have written a C# Windows Service that Traces important information and statistics. It is required for me to create a seperate Windows Forms application that can attach to this service and read in the trace information for display, so that a user can see what the service is doing, similar to VS.NET's debugger.

I'm at a loss for a good way to do this. For statistics I'm sure I could implement performance counters, but for messages and status, I'm not sure performance counters are entirely appropriate.

I could write the trace information to a text file, but a) the text file won't be able to be read because it's in use by the TraceListener b) the location of the log would have to be hardcoded or configured, which is sort of unattractive c) a system would have to be put in place to poll the log which is also sort of blah. I suppose I may not have a choice and just deal with doing it this way.

Does anyone have any suggestions of where to start?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Mike