 <p>There are certainly many options for this, but one that is very easy to implement and meets your criteria is an <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480512.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Asynchronous Web Service</a> call.</p> <p>This does not require you to start a worker thread (the Framework will do that behind the scenes). Rather than use one of the options outlined in that link to fetch the result, simply ignore the result since it is meaningless to the calling app.</p>