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I'm developing a .net WPF application, and I would like to put in a two way IPC mechanism. I realize named pipes and remoting are options, however I would like to make the mechanism not dependent on .NET for non-.NET applications to communicate with my application.

What does SO recommend as a solution to this? WM_COPYDATA?

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I would use named pipes, in this case.

Named pipes are fully supported in native code as well as .NET. They provide a very fast, efficient way of working, and are very easy to work with in .NET for your current development. This is a much better option (in just about every way, IMO) to WM_COPYDATA.

That being said, there are quite a few Interprocess Communication options. Many of these work both in .NET and native code, including:

  • Clipboard
  • COM
  • File Mapping
  • Pipes
  • Windows Sockets
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Agreed that they beat WM_COPYDATA. Not sure that they're as well-supported as TCP/IP solutions, though. (I'm including things like WCF here, not just plain HTTP.)
@Steven: That's why I included Windows Sockets (last option), which includes TCP/IP (as well as UDP sockets).
@Steven: Pipes are very well supported on Windows, though - so anywhere WM_COPYDATA would work, pipes should work.
While anything capable of SDK calls can do pipe I/O, .NET only got decent support in 3.5. Even then, it's just a thin wrapper over the OS and what it's wrapping isn't a whole lot of fun. I've used named pipes extensively for IPC and RPC, over the last 15 years, and I still don't like them. In the end, the IPC part is implemented over shared memory, just like TCP/IP to localhost, but you get all the complexity of Windows file security and lose access to SOAP, REST and all the rest. It's not a stupid choice by any means, but it wouldn't be where I turn to first. My $0.02.
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Named pipes wouldn't be .NET specific. Neither would shared memory mapping or even TCP/IP. As for .NET remoting, I'd avoid it, even for cases where both sides are .NET.

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