Recommended way to communicate between processes running on different computers on the same network?

Named pipes will work, but it's tricky to get it to work if all of the computers are not on the same domain.

Named pipes will work, but it's tricky to get it to work if all of the computers are not on the same domain. Another option, of course, is just to use sockets. It's not much more complicated to use sockets than it is to use Named Pipes.

Finally, if all applications are . NET, then WCF is an option as well. The main benefit here is that you don't have to worry the over-the-wire protocol, it's just a series of methods calls.

Though WCF does add some overhead in terms of security and configuration.

1 WCF, for . NET, is the way to achieve this. – Will Marcouiller Mar 10 '10 at 4:00 @codeka: Wow, you mentioning that pipes are tricky across domains was quite eye-opening for me; I was indeed trying to use them from two different domains.

I gave it another shot on two computers in the same domain and it worked perfectly. More importantly, your suggestion to look into WCF (all the applications are indeed in . NET) was very helpful.

I'm looking into that now. – Dan Tao Mar 12 '10 at 2:15.

MailSlots is another alternative that might work for you, it allows messages to be broadcast to targeted machine or a local network. I have an open source implementation wrapped in a C# library that may help. It uses a MailSlot implementation for network propagation, but also falls back to WM_COPYDATA windows messages or IOStreams in order to dispatch messages to all processes on a single machine.

This gets around a limitation that only one process can read a MailSlot message. xdmessaging.codeplex.com.

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