How best to communicate between AppDomains?

Question

I have an application that needs to send a moderately high volume of messages between a number of AppDomains. I know that I could implement this using remoting, but I have also noticed that there are cross-domain delegates. Has anyone looked at this kind of problem?

Answer 1

This is just a quick thought, but I heard that even for cross-domain communication WCF would be the recommended approach, starting from .NET 3.0 of course. Actually this makes sense, as remoting is just another technology wrapped by WCF.

Answer 2

I have had good success using WCF with a named pipes binding. Using named pipes creates no network traffic and uses binary encoding, so it should be pretty fast without sacrificing the ability to distribute in future scaling scenarios.

EDIT: Refer here for more detailed information including a link to an implementation example.

Answer 3

A cross-domain delegate only allows a void method with zero parameters, and it's probably not what you think it is. It's only barely useful as a simple callback for notification purposes from one appdomain to another, e.g. a method like InitComplete() or something.

Remoting is the ONLY choice, whether you call it WCF or whatever else, passing serializable types, or using MBRO types (MarshalByRefObjects). It's not as hard as you think.

-Oisin