I have a Windows Service that monitors a COM port connected to a vendors hardware. This is a very busy piece of hardware that is constantly polling other devices on the wire (this is a twisted-pair RS485 "network"). My software needs to emulate X number of hardware devices on this wire, so I've got a multi-threaded thing going on with a multi-tiered state machine to keep track of where the communications protocol is at any moment.
Problem is with a Windows Service (this is my first one, BTW) is that you need some debugging to let you know if stuff is working properly. When I was first developing this state machine/multi-thread code I had a windows form with a RichTextBox that displayed the ASCII chars going back-n-forth on the line. Seems like I can't really have that GUI niceness with a service. I tried opening a form in the service via another program that sent the service messages that are received via the OnCustomCommand() handler but it didn't seem to work. I had "Allow service to interact with desktop" checked and everything. I was using the Show() and Hide() methods of my debug form.
I guess I don't need to see all of the individual characters going on the line but man that sure would be nice (I think I really need to see them :-) ). So does anyone have any crazy ideas that could help me out? I don't want to bog down the system with some IPC that isn't meant for the voluminous amount of data that is sure to come through. It will only be very short-term debugging though, just confirmation that the program, the RS485-to-USB dongle, and hardware is all working.