Background process in .NET MAUI

[hrahmansha]

I am developing a .NET MAUI application targeting Windows and MacOS. Currently, I am working on a feature to create a data collection module that continuously gathers system data for use throughout the application. This module will be managed by the main module. The main module will start/stop the data collection and send scan configuration settings.

The application is already experiencing performance issues with existing features, so I am considering running the data collection task in a separate process instead of a thread.

I found that the Shiny.NET library has background Jobs which does similar work, but it does not have support for Windows.

What are the potential methods for running my data collection module as a separate process that can interact with (receive commands from and send data to) my MAUI application?

[davepruitt]

I don't know about a separate "process", but I typically use BackgroundWorker whenever I need to do stuff in a separate thread.

[stephenquan]

You can create a singleton service with methods to do the start/stop gathering system data in a separate thread. You can use EventHandlers or WeakReferenceMessenger to broadcast events from your service to the rest of the application. Subscribers to the service can use a relevant UI thread Dispatcher to post updates to view models connected to your UI on the UI thread.