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Inter-Process Communication in .NET Using Named Pipes, Part 1
1. Introduction
Have you ever needed to exchange data between two .NET applications running on the same machine? For example a web site talking to a Windows service? The .NET Framework provides several good options for inter-process communication (IPC) like Web services and Remoting, the fastest being Remoting with a TCP channel and binary formatter.
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Download the .NET Named Pipes solution, which includes:
- A Named Pipes Wrapper
- Multithreaded Pipes Server
- Named Pipes Client
- The two parts of this article.
- AppDomain.NamedPipes reference
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The problem however is that Remoting is relatively slow, which most of the time is irrelevant, but if you need to make frequent "chatty" calls from one application to another and if your primary concern is performance, then Remoting might become an obstacle. What makes Remoting slow is not so much the communication protocol but the serialization.
Generally speaking Remoting is great but in the case when the IPC is confined to the local machine, it adds unnecessary overhead. That is why I started looking at alternatives, namely Named Pipes that will not involve binary serialization and will provide fast and lightweight IPC.
The first part of this article explores a way of implementing Named Pipes based IPC between .NET applications. In Part 2 we look at building a pipe server and a client communicating with it.
Remember that the situations where this solution would be most beneficial is when one application is exchanging frequent short text messages with another, located on the same machine or within the same LAN. For structured data exchange those text messages can also be XML documents or serialized .NET objects. No security layer is implemented because Named Pipes are accessible within the LAN only and it is assumed that security will be handled by the existing infrastructure.
For more information on Named Pipes visit the MSDN Library. The NamedPipeNative class, part of this solution, is based on the Named Pipes Remoting Channel by Jonathan Hawkins.
.NET Named Pipes Discussion
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