Simple messaging options for .net programs

Question

We have two applications with a thick .NET client that need to send messages to each other on the same computer, and we are looking for ideas on how to do this. We thought about removing MSMQ and .NET, but both of them seem to be network technologies with heavier hardware than we are now interested in using. There are no command line arguments because we want to send messages to running instances of the application. Does anyone know a really easy way to send messages between applications on the same machine in .NET?

Answer 1

Anonymous tubes are probably the best choice:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb546102.aspx

The link above shows a simple example. This will only work on one computer, so there is no gubbins network or WCF configuration or whatever.

Answer 2

WCF is a very common tool for this. On the same machine, you can configure it to use named pipes as a transport mechanism, which is very fast and quite small.

Depending on the messages, you can make one or both programs a WCF server, and then add the client link to another program for communication.