Communicate with named pipes and multiple clients?

Question

Hi!

I have a application that can run in multiple instances on the same computer. Then I also have a smaller program that on starup most connect to the existing instances(on the same computer) of the main application. Some data will be transfared to establish what instance the smaller program should coninue to talk to.

Named pipes with WCF seems to be the way to go?

If I got it right the named pipes works more or less the same way as if I was bulding a Server/Client WCF application.

The problem I see is how to connect to the multiple instances? In regular WCF application you will know the path to the service but in this case there coulde be more then one?

I know that the new WCF supports some kind of broadcasting so the clients do not have to use a specific path but can instead listen on the net and find the service to connect to. Is this possible with named pipes?

Pleas advice

Answer 1

I think you are talking about WCF discovering, but if I don't get you wrong it seems you need something closer to the RoutingService: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee517422.aspx

With that you have a single path to the service (the RoutingService) for all your clients and it's responsibility of the RoutingService to redirect the calls to the right services configured in its routing table (this configuration can be altered at runtime). A great article about RoutingService can be found here:

http://weblogs.thinktecture.com/cweyer/2009/05/whats-new-in-wcf4-routing-service---or-look-ma-just-one-service-to-talk-to.html

Regards

Answer 2

We are currently designing a similar system.

The way we plan to do it is:

• On start up the clients will notify a service that they are running and can receive notifications at a specific address
• When the server program needs to send something out it will look at the notifications and use those addresses.