What is the best and easiest method that can be used for inter-process communication in a very large project?
My requirement is to communicate between a normal Windows Forms Application and Windows Services.
Methods that are easy to maintain and implement are preferred.
Thanks
It really depends on the project as there are a large number of methods.
This may depend on where the different portions of the project run (They could run on different servers, or different technology stacks altogether.).
The most common method is probably web services. Although these come with an overhead, so it may be worth looking at a simple interface API via a DLL.
Whatever you do it should probably be thought about and designed carefully, considering security and performance, and how you will extend or modify it in the future.
From the tags I understand that we are talking about .NET. Perhaps you should try Microsoft WCF. It unifies this issue, abstracting specific inter-process (inter-service) communication technology from actual code. So generally you'll design and write the interfaces that your processes will use to talk to each other and then you'll configure a specific communication technology in XML config file. That is, you have rather clear separation between "what do the processes talk about" and "how is this communication implemented specifically".
WCF supports SOAP, TCP\IP communication, MSMQ etc., you processes can be IIS-hosted web-services, usual Windows services, console applications etc. - all this under unified framework. I think, this is exactly what you are looking for.
Not necessarily the best or the easiest....
In the .NET world try MSMQ or IBM MQ message queue middle ware.
If the communication is mostly 1-way, then consider using WCF services, which are both good and easy if you let the code generators in Visual Studio do most of the work for you.