What is the best way for C# app to communicate unix c++ app

Question

the ways I can think of

1. Web service or soap
2. Socket
3. Database table
4. shared file

Any concise example you know of for webservice?

Answer 1

Sockets are easiest; and I would always go for that first. If database is an option, that's also trivial, but that would really depend. If it's queued events, that would make sense, but if it's request/response, it's probably not so great.

Answer 2

Web services or soap would be fairly easy, however, if the C++ application isn't a web server naturally (or the C# application), it may be easier to just use socket programming directly.

Sockets are fairly easy to use from both C# and C++. They give you complete control over the type of date transmitted, at the cost of potentially a little more work in the handling.

The biggest issues to watch for are probably endianness of binary data, and encoding of text data, if you use sockets directly. Otherwise, it's very easy.

Answer 3

you can use gsoap to have a C/C++ program use a webservice.

You can also call a cgi program that is written in C++.

I have written a server in C that communicated with a C# client, and the endianess can be a pain to deal with, webservices is so much simpler.

Answer 4

Do you want it to communicate with each other (for instance, through tcp (like many others have pointed)) or do you want to be able to translate objects from C# to C++? If so, check out Apache Thrift (http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/).

Answer 5

Since you are already aware of the Web service and socket approach, I'll mention some other options. If you like simplicity, check out XML-RPC. This is what SOAP was before large standards committees and corporate interests began to control the specification. You can find implementations of XML-RPC for just about every major programming language out there. Hessian is an interesting binary protocol that has many fans and supports just about every major language as well. Protocol Buffers is popular within Google. The official version from Google does not support C#. However, the two highest rep users of SO do provide ports of protobuf for the .Net space.

I will probably be ridiculed for this, but also take a look at CORBA. It's not in vogue these days, but has many substantial technical creds, especially if one end of the communication is C++. IMHO, it's WS-* with OO support and no angle brackets required. For interop, I think it still should have a seat at the table. When engaged in C++ development, I found OmniOrb to be quite effective and efficient. Take a look at this SO Question for some pointers concerning using CORBA in .Net.