How can I get a Silverlight 4 client to connect to a windows service

I have an existing window service. It does not use WCF and nor do I want it to. The windows service listens on a port and once a socket connects it starts publishing application status information every second.

I want to build a SilverLight application th开发者_开发技巧at can consume all the published information and update a display. I have come across plenty of articles that describe this for a web service or for a WCF service. I have stock standard executable running as a window service. Am I trying to do the impossible here.

Silverlight has some support for using sockets directly. See Working With Sockets on MSDN. Pay special attention to the part about security restrictions policy. If Silverlight runs in the sandbox (not OOB) you cannot connect to any random host on the network.