What is the simplest method of inter-process communication between 2 C processes

Question

I want to create a communication between a parent and a child process  both written in C   It should be asynchronous  event-driven  I don t want to run a thread in every process to handle the very rare communication  What is the best solution for it

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Named pipes on WCF   http   msdn microsoft com en-us library ms733769 aspx

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The easiest solution in C  for inter-process communication when security is not a concern and given your constraints  two C  processes on the same machine  is the Remoting API  Now Remoting is a legacy technology  not the same as deprecated  and not encouraged for use in new projects  but it does work well and does not require a lot of pomp and circumstance to get working    There is an excellent article on MSDN for using the class IpcChannel from the Remoting framework  credit to Greg Beech for the find here  for setting up a simple remoting server and client   I Would suggest trying this approach first  and then try to port your code to WCF  Windows Communication Framework   Which has several advantages  better security  cross-platform   but is necessarily more complex  Luckily MSDN has a very good article for porting code from Remoting to WCF   If you want to dive in right away with WCF there is a great tutorial here

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There s also COM   There are technicalities  but I d say the advantage is that you ll be able to call methods that you can define   MSDN offers C  COM interop tutorials  Please search because these links do change   To get started rightaway go here

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I would suggest using the Windows Communication Foundation   http   en wikipedia org wiki Windows Communication Foundation  You can pass objects back and forth  use a variety of different protocols   I would suggest using the binary tcp protocol

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There s also MSMQ  Microsoft Message Queueing  which can operate across networks as well as on a local computer  Although there are better ways to communicate it s worth looking into  https   msdn microsoft com en-us library ms711472 v vs 85  aspx

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If your processes in same computer  you can simply use stdio   This is my usage  a web page screenshooter   var jobProcess   new Process     jobProcess StartInfo FileName   Assembly GetExecutingAssembly   Location  jobProcess StartInfo Arguments    job    jobProcess StartInfo CreateNoWindow   false  jobProcess StartInfo UseShellExecute   false   jobProcess StartInfo RedirectStandardInput   true  jobProcess StartInfo RedirectStandardOutput   true  jobProcess StartInfo RedirectStandardError   true      Just Console WriteLine it  jobProcess ErrorDataReceived    jp ErrorDataReceived   jobProcess Start     jobProcess BeginErrorReadLine     try       jobProcess StandardInput WriteLine url       var buf   new byte int Parse jobProcess StandardOutput ReadLine          jobProcess StandardOutput BaseStream Read buf  0  buf Length       return Deserz lt Bitmap gt  buf     finally       if  jobProcess HasExited    false          jobProcess Kill        Detect args on Main  static void Main string   args        if  args Length    1  amp  amp  args 0    job                   because stdout has been used by send back  our logs should put to stderr         Log SetLogOutput Console Error             try                       var url   Console ReadLine                var bmp   new WebPageShooterCr   Shoot url               var buf   Serz bmp               Console WriteLine buf Length               System Threading Thread Sleep 100               using  var o   Console OpenStandardOutput                    o Write buf  0  buf Length                     catch  Exception ex                        Log E  Err     ex Message

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Anonymous pipes   Use Asynchronous operations with BeginRead BeginWrite and AsyncCallback

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Following are the ways to do Inter Process Communication asynchronously   Anonymous Pipes https   docs microsoft com en-us dotnet api system io pipes anonymouspipeserverstream view net-5 0 Named Pipes https   www codeproject com Articles 1179195 Full-Duplex-Asynchronous-Read-Write-with-Named-Pip Sockets https   docs microsoft com en-us dotnet framework network-programming asynchronous-server-socket-example Shared memory

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necromancing it s just way more easy to make a shared file if possible    out File AppendAllText  quot sharedFile txt quot    quot payload text here quot       in File ReadAllText  quot sharedFile txt quot

[c#] What is the simplest method of inter-process communication between 2 C# processes?

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