Interprocess communication in .NET

Question

I have a core .NET application that needs to spawn an abitrary number of sub processes. These processes need to be able to access some form of state object in the core application.

What is the best technique? I'll be moving a large amount of data between processes (Bitmaps), so it needs to be fast.

Answer 1

WCF would probably fit the bill.

Here's a really good article on .NET remoting for performing distributed intensive analysis. Though remoting has been replaced with the WCF, the article is relevant and shows how to make the calls asynchronously, etc.

This article contrasts WCF to .NET remoting -- EDIT: the key take away here shows that WCF throughput outperforms remoting for small data but approaches Remoting performance as data size increases.