How to do a non-waiting write on a named pipe (c#) ?

Question

Hello,

I'm using .net 3.5 named pipes and my server side is :

serverPipeStream = new NamedPipeServerStream("myPipe", PipeDirection.InOut, 1, PipeTransmissionMode.Byte, PipeOptions.Asynchronous);

When I write some data with, say, BinaryWriter, the write() call itself doesn't return until the client side has called a read() on its NamedPipeClientStream.

The BinaryWriter is :

writer = new BinaryWriter(serverPipeStream);

I'm aware that NamedPipeServerStream offers a BeginRead/BeginWrite but from what I gather, named pipes are supposed to allow streamwriters to perform on top of them (as seen in many Microsoft-given examples).

So how can I make my write() to the named pipe non-waiting ?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

The problem is BinaryWriter doesn't have a BeginWrite function so, as suggested here, you could write to a MemoryStream and then use the its buffer to pass to the BeginWrite function of the pipe.

Hope that helps.