IpcAnonymousPipes

Interprocess communication using anonymus pipes. The goal of this project is to provide a simple framework to send and receive byte arrays over anonymus pipes efficiently. You may use a serialization library of your choice on top of this to implement messaging.

• Targets .NET Standard 2.0
• Lightweight and easy to use
• Client-Server architecture
• One-to-one duplex communication
• Works with simple byte arrays

Usage

NuGet package

Install-Package IpcAnonymousPipes

PipeServer

The server side PipeServer will create two anonymus pipes: input and output. The handles will be passed to the client app as process arguments.

void StartServer()
{
    // Create pipe server
    Server = new PipeServer();
    
    // Start client process with command line arguments
    Process.Start("MyClient.exe", Server.GetClientArgs());
    
    // Receiving on background thread
    Server.ReceiveAsync(stream =>
    {
        Console.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stream.ReadToEnd()));
    });
    
    // Wait for client connection
    Server.WaitForClient();
    
    // Say Hi to the client
    Server.Send(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("Hi!"));
}

PipeClient

This is a minimal client implementation with a console application. The Client will be disposed when the server sends a disconnect signal to this client.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    // Create pipe client
    // The empty constructor parses command line arguments to get the pipe handles.
    using (var Client = new PipeClient())
    {
        // Receiving on background thread
        Client.ReceiveAsync(stream =>
        {
            Console.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stream.ReadToEnd()));
        });

        // Read line from console, press ENTER to send
        while (Client.IsConnected)
            Client.Send(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(Console.ReadLine()));
    }
}

Example applications

You can find two WPF applications in the repository. I wrote them in order to demonstrate the two-way communication between the server and the client.

ServerWpfApp

Download the source and build the solution. Then you can start the ServerWpfApp project.
The ServerWpfApp project does not reference ClientWpfApp project, they are completely independent from each other. My goal was to run the client inside a standalone process, so it lives in it's own Application Domain.

ClientWpfApp

The client ClientWpfApp will be started automatically by ServerWpfApp. You can send messages by typing into the textbox and pressing the Send button.