C#: Decoupled comms between applications
<p>I have been asked to write an application that is going to act as a controller for a number of other external applications. It will run as a scheduled task and its purpose will be to process any new files it finds in a certain location and call external handlers depending on the file type to process them. </p>

<p>The controller application will have to wait until the handler application has finished before calling the next and will also need to know whether or not it was successful.</p>

<p>There is an added complication in that some of the files may be software packages and its possible that a software packages purpose may be to update the controller application itself. For this reason whatever framework I use has to take this into account.</p>

<p>Basically Im just looking for some design inspiration here to try and figure out a robust method of decoupled communication between controller and handler.</p>
