Worker Services

So far, all of the samples I gave you are console apps; straightforward but aimed at you, the reader, so you can see what happened. However, in real life, systems programmers do not need a console to write output or read input. We deal with software that talks and listens to other software. Systems software usually does not have a user interface. A console window is a form of user interface, which we do not need.

I will continue to use the console since that is a straightforward way to show you what happens, and in those applications, we can focus on the core of what I am trying to show you.

However, in the real world, our applications work mainly behind the scenes. One of the ways to do that is to build services.

A service is a standalone application that has no user interface. It does the work quietly behind the scenes. It does communicate with the outside world, but it does so through one of the many ways described in previous chapters: through network connections...