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Answer 1

+1 A:

WCF is very good, but really shines when using WCF on both sides of the communication channel. Trying to hook up legacy code to a WCF service is tricky at best.

It will likely be easier to make your C# service use NamedPipeServerStream directly. This will give you complete control over how the connection and transfer is handled. That being said, there is nothing preventing you from doing both (implementing a custom NamedPipeServerStream channel, as well as exposing one or more WCF endpoints, from within the same program). This would provide a way to move forward if you ever want to upgrade the client, as well.

Reed Copsey 2010-09-21 15:34:13

With a NamedPipeServerStream, can I send back return data or would I be basically doing some type of bidirectional communication on the pipe so that the client would need to "listen" for return data? I would love to upgrade the client but right now it's not in scope and not sure if it ever will be.

Brian Behm 2010-09-21 16:23:18

@Brian: You'd basically just do whatever your C++ program is currently doing - it's possible to do bi-directional communication in a single pipe - but I'm not sure what your current program is expecting.

Reed Copsey 2010-09-21 16:29:29

@Reed currently the VB6 code calls with a command like "GiveMeSomeInfo" to the service, which returns the info in the outputBuffer provided by CallNamedPipe. So really it's used like a remote method call. Like you say I could do exactly what the C++ code is doing and PInvoke the Win32 code to setup the named pipe and return the data. I was kinda hoping to make WCF work.

Brian Behm 2010-09-21 16:39:18

@Brian: I was more thinking you could use NamedPipeServerStream, on the C# side, to mimick what the C++ code was doing with the Win32 API... It's really a fairly thin API wrapper (that lets you use Stream classes, etc).

Reed Copsey 2010-09-21 16:48:41

Unfortunately, WCF really kind of dictates the format (on both sides of the channel), so to make it work cleanly with legacy code is not trivial..

Reed Copsey 2010-09-21 16:49:10

Answer 2

A:

Brian,

Could you call the C++ named Pipes application directly from your C# code using PInvoke

Pinvoke.net

Then the wrap the pinvoke service around a WCF Service for easy interop.

Regards

Iain

Iain 2010-09-21 15:37:36

I want to call from VB6 to a new C# application. The goal is to get rid of the C++ code.

Brian Behm 2010-09-21 16:21:50

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