Best way to write a polling capable application
<p>I'm trying to build a basic application which will have 2 separate components which are:<br>
  1. Continually poll an external process and store the results within a DB<br>
  2. Grab the results from the DB and display it in a webpage</p>

<p>I'm looking to do this in .Net so I would normally say to do the first component in a Windows Service and the second in ASP.net with a relational dbms like sql server.</p>

<p>The problem with this is that i want to use webhosting to deploy this and they don't tend to allow Windows Services (unless you pay a fortune).  So is it feasible to do the polling component in a seperate asp.net page, or maybe create a spawning worker thread within a single asp.net page that will do the polling for me?</p>

<p>Any opinions/input appreciated.<br>
Thanks :)</p>
