I have a Windows service that's running all the time, and takes some action every 15 minutes. I also have a client WinForms app that displays some information about what the service is doing. I'd like the forms application to keep itself updated with a recent status, but I'm not sure if polling every second is a good move performance-wise.

• When it starts, my Windows Service opens a WCF named pipe to receive queries (from my client form)
• Every second, a timer on the winform sends a query to the pipe, and then displays the results. If the pipe isn't there, the form displays that the service isn't running.

Is that the best way to do this? If my service opens the pipe when it starts, will it always stay open (until I close it or my service stops)? In addition to polling the service, maybe there's some way for the service to notify any watching applications of certain events, like starting and stopping processing? That way, I could poll less, since I'd presumably know about big events already, and would only be polling for progress.

Anything that I'm missing?