I recently posted on How To Receive Configuration Updates without restarting a .NET Windows Service. For some reason it never showed up in Google Reader. I guessed the reader maybe missed it for some reason. Perhaps it was something in the naming of my post.
Like I mentioned in the article, it is possible to update the configuration and not have to restart the service. I was interested in learning how when I saw that log4net was doing it. I didn't take quite the same path they did, but I was influenced quite a bit by seeing how they did it.
Read the article here.