Re-connect to web service?

I am using C# to write a program that uses a web service from http://msrmaps.com, the proble开发者_JS百科m is sometimes (seemingly at random) the site won't work properly and will return a few different exceptions. Then on subsequent attempts to use the service I get the error over and over, then after a while (sometimes 30 minutes) the service starts working properly again. In order to avoid waiting for the service to work properly again, I usually just close my program and start it back up again. Usually that fixes the problem and I can continue to use the web service.

My question: Is it possible to restart my program within the program or better yet is there a way to somehow re-connect to the web service like the program does when I first run it?

What is the program actually doing that depends on the web service? Does it really need to be re-started? It sounds like you should be able to just have some UI element in the application that attempts to connect to the service. Wrap that connection in some exception handling and somewhere in the application's UI display that the service connection is currently unavailable.

Or am I way off here?

Warning: This is a bit of a hack, but it works.

I'm assuming your application is unattended, so a UI change alerting the user to the need to shut down and restart is not an option.

We had a similar situation where the simplest resolution to a problem was to shut down and restart my app. (We'll call this "App A").

What I wound up doing was writing a second executable (We'll call it "App B") as a console app that did two things.

1. It used the System.Diagnostics.Process to kill any instance App A.
2. Use System.Diagnostics.Process to re-launch App A after all instances were killed.

Then in App A, I had a try/catch around the offending code, and when the error I was looking for came up, it would call App B.

This was the only way I could find of killing a program and relaunching it. If anyone has a better solution, PLEASE post it and I'll change my hack to use a better solution.

I would check that you don't have too many simultaneous requests happening at the same time due to each waiting for a long time before returning (and relatedly, that the total allowed connections as per machine.config is high enough). Throttling code can be very useful with unattended use of web-services (or any other remote service), if you've had a few failures in a row then wait a while before allowing another request to be made (I like to roll forward the wait period each time, starting a around a minute, maxing the wait at around 10minutes).

Then while you can't guarantee the other service won't go down, you can help prevent it causing a permanent problem, or reducing the performance of other processes.