Win32 System Services: The Heart of Windows® 98 and Windows® 2000

6.11. Interprocess Communication

There are some situations where you want a new process to be able to communicate with other processes on its system, or with other systems on the network. For example, you might want to create a Control Panel applet to control a service (see Chapter 12). Or several processes might want to share information so that they can chop up a problem among themselves. There are three preferred mechanisms that you can use for interprocess communication:

1. Named Pipes: In situations where one process knows that another will probably be there when it starts up, named pipes are useful. For example, if you want to use a Control Panel applet to control a service, then named pipes are appropriate. The applet knows that the service ...