IPC between a C# application and other applications in C++ and VB.Net

I have a C# server application and it needs to talk to and control another 3 client applications: one in C#, one in C++ and one in VB.Net. All of them are Windows Form applications. They basically need to exchange some strings and numbers, not heavily loaded. What is the best way to do IPC between C# and those different languages? Note that clients don't talk to each other, they only talk to the server.

C# needs to talk to C++ so I guess WCF i开发者_开发知识库sn't good, as WCF only works between two .Net applications?

Can I use named pipes conveniently in all these languages: C#, C++ and VB.Net?

I also want to know if in the future I have to add VB6, VBScript and PowerShell scripts as clients, what would be the best IPC option that works for all these 6 languages? Will I still be able to use named pipes?

---

Actually WCF configured to expose services via HTTP might be the best option for the list of languages you want to support.

If you don't like WCF consider exposing HTTP REST interfaces i.e. by writing server in ASP.Net MVC.

Named pipes support - C#/VB.Net, C++ - good, VB6 - I don't know, VBScript - definitely not out of the box, PowerShell - yes as it can use .Net libraries.

---

The fastest solutions for the languages you listed are named pipes and, better still, memory mapped files. Both have implementations in .NET 4.0 and unmanaged C++.

I would recommend looking into memory mapped files. It's relatively straighforward to create a file and an associated view that serve as single-producer, multiple-consumer, unidirectional channel. You can use, say, the first 4 bytes of the area to store the updated value of the last byte written (modulo the view size - 4 bytes) and an EventWaitHandle to synchronise producer/consumer access. Two channels accessing separate memory mapped files will give you a duplex channel.

Links for .NET (C# and VB.NET) and unmanaged C++.

You may then want to look into Protocol Buffers as a very efficient way to serialise your binary data.

0MQ is an excellent product in the Linux space but the Windows version is somewhat stripped-down, and among other things doesn't support IPC.

---

There are different libraries you can try such as OpenDDS, ZeroMQ and others. Though ZeroMQ on Windows does not support IPC yet (but supports TCP).