What are windows IPC methods

Question

Question: I have a dll that I can load in another program. Now the dll has access to all data/functions in the other program.

Which technology can I use that now an external program can send data/commands to that dll, to steer the other program, or get data from it ?

I mean, in the past that meant DDE, I think that was back in Windows 3.11/95 times. What can I use today? Which one is easiest ? Which one is fastest?

Answer 1

Some common ones are:

• Named Pipes. Fairly easy to implement.
• Shared Memory. A little more work but may be a little bit faster (at least in my testing).
• Sockets. This is fairly simple and very portable but not as high performance. But it is sure nice if you suddenly want to be able to communicate with a process running on a different machine.

Answer 2

COM is the de-facto standard IPC mechanism for Windows-focused applications nowadays.

It allows access across language-barriers, solves the binary interface compatibility problem, does transparent marshalling for you and has different threading models.

sharptooth summarized some facts nicely here.