I have used IPC in Win32 code a while ago - critical sections, events, and semaphores.
How is the scene in the .NET environment?
Are there any tutorial explaining all available options and when to use and why?
Most recent Microsoft's stuff in IPC is Windows Communication Foundation. Actually there is nothing new in the lower level (tcp, upd, named pipes etc) But WCF simplifies IPC development greatly.
Useful resource:
Interprocess Communication with WCF on Dr. Dobb's portal
WCF Communication Options in the .NET Framework 3.5
and of course MSDN on WCF
Apart from the obvious (WCF), there is a ZeroMQ binding for C#/CLR which is pretty good:
http://www.zeromq.org/bindings:clr
Does message-oriented IPC, pub/sub and various other strategies with much less code and config than WCF.
It's also at least an order of magnitude faster than anything else and has less latency if you require low latency comms.
With respects to semaphores, locks, mutexes etc. If you share by communicating rather than communicate by sharing, you'll have a whole load less hassle than the traditional paradigm.
I tend to use named pipes or Unix sockets (depending on whether I'm targetting MS.NET or Mono -- I have a class that abstracts it away) since it's easy to use, portable, and allows me to easily interoperate with unmanaged code. That said, if you're only dealing with managed code, go with WCF or remoting -- the latter if you need Mono support, since their WCF support simply isn't there yet.
I would recommend using Memory Mapped Files if you need to use on the machine domain not communication through network. See the following link.
http://techmikael.blogspot.com/2010/02/blazing-fast-ipc-in-net-4-wcf-vs.html
There is also .NET Remoting, which I found quite cool, but I guess they are obsoleting it now that they have WCF.
It sounds as though you're interested in synchronization techniques rather than communication. If so, you might like to start here, or perhaps this more concise overview.
Related
Alright, so I've asked several questions on StackOverflow about .NET Remoting, and there is always at least one person who just has to chime in, ".NET Remoting is deprecated, use WCF instead." I understand that it's deprecated and there is no guarantee of future support with new versions of the .NET Framework. But what are some other good reasons we would want to move over to WCF? I have seen a few mostly minor annoyances with .NET Remoting, however, this is not enough to change the minds the powers that be who believe firmly in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". At this time, the only reason that attitude will change is if .NET Remoting is removed from a future version of the .NET Framework, so who knows how long that will be?
Does anybody have any insight as why exactly WCF is "better" than .NET Remoting, or why Remoting is inferior to WCF? What are the pros and cons of each technology? Are there additional things you can do with WCF and not with Remoting?
I mean, it would be great if I could convince them to let us migrate our software over to WCF just to allow a configurable TcpChannel timeout to be set on the client side (this seems to have been broken for a while, no matter what steps or troubleshooting I try), and when this happens, it makes our software look like absolute shite.
Thanks in advance for helping to shed some light on this.
There are plenty of reasons to ditch remoting; a few might include:
lack of transport flexibility
versioning requirements are huge pain
platform dependent (no sensible chance of cross-platform usage)
no chance of usage from the growing mobile market
lack of future development: whatever feature you want added - it won't be
however, I would disagree that WCF is the automatic replacement; WCF itself is a pretty versatile tool, but can be pretty complex, and has restrictions of its own. I haven't used it myself, but I have seen lots of praise for Service Stack, essentially with users describing it as "WCF done right", i.e. the good bits of WCF, without the pain points. However, there are plenty of other options too. One nice thing about the idea of Service Stack, though, is that it iterates pretty quickly, and if it lacks something you want you can change it.
.NET Remoting is now a legacy technology, quoted from MSDN:
This topic is specific to a legacy technology that is retained for backward compatibility with existing applications and is not recommended for new development. Distributed applications should now be developed using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
And here is a performance comparison between WCF and .NET Remoting done in 2007: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx
To summarize the results, WCF is 25%—50% faster than ASP.NET Web
Services, and approximately 25% faster than .NET Remoting.
So I guess speed is a good reason to drop .NET Remoting.
While the given reasons are probably the driving considerations there are other non-trivial reasons:
Transport independence
IDE tooling
Ease of testing
Maintainability
When you use WCF you can change transport merely by editing your config file. This can be very handy when some sanctimonious system admin won't open a port and you need to use HTTP on port 80 to get through the corporate firewall.
The WCF tooling in Visual Studio is phenomenal. The hardest part is figuring out the URL you need. After that it's just point and click for code generation. There are one or two gotchas with serialisation of collections but broadly speaking if you tell both ends to use arrays it will just plain work. If you need a collection at the destination you can always construct one around the received array, and since LINQ will happily operate on arrays you can fold this into other transformations.
I'm not sure what Stephan P means by pain points. Editing the config can be tricky but Microsoft provides an excellent GUI tool that takes all the guesswork out of it by providing a full tree of options yet generating a sparse config file.
WCF services are easy to test because they have a published interface to which you can connect a test harness. This is more a virtue of SoA in general rather than WCF in particular, but it's still desirable.
WCF makes things a great deal simpler in my code, since neither application nor service is polluted with "routing" code (to determine what ought to process the message content); it looks like simple method calls or implementations. I mostly use WCF as a wrapper for MSMQ, and the only visible consequence of the transport selection is that these method calls must all be void functions because it's a OneWay transport. But that's hardly surprising when the point was persistent queueing.
This all speaks to maintainability. Even for in-house applications, maintenance is a dominant cost, and when you're supporting your software at customer sites poor maintainability can be crippling.
Then there's interoperability with otherwise incompatible platforms. In this case I'm thinking of using HTTP/XML or HTTP/JSON to provide service to web apps written in (eg) PHP.
Going the other way isn't quite so easy but it's fairly straightforward.
I give points for WCF with respect to logging and security.
Logging
WCF has an integrated Logging mechanism that helps you log traces that become a boon during maintanence. In other technologies, developer has to do some work to achieve this but in WCF, all that we have to do is to enable trace by changing the config file and WCF starts providing traces for you.
Security
Security mechanism in WCF is fairly simple and out of box when you look from the implementors perspective but is very robust and highly secure. The best part is that for the highy used and recommended bindings, WCF provides default security which can be trusted to the core. The message security on WSHTTPbinding is an example on these lines.
.NET Framework remoting does not do authentication or encryption by default. Therefore, it is recommended that you take all necessary steps to make certain of the identity of clients or servers before interacting with them remotely
Moreover WCF is an framework to develop Service Oriented applications under microsoft platform mixing both message and rpc style of programming. Which was not in the remoting. Remoting is basically oriented to rpc only.
I'm looking for a technology which is targeting on building distributed applications. My friend adviced me to use CORBA (Java & C++ combination) . But I have read it's sort of obsolete stuff. I'm planning to write rather simple distributed application. What solutions would you advice to use? Thanks!
If you want to distribute your code logic to multiple servers and have it managed as a single entity, I would recommend CloudIQ Platform from Appistry. You can deploy Java, .NET and C/C++ code to the framework. From an administrative point of view, the servers work and act as one. When you submit a request for execution, the framework distributes the request to the best available worker, performing load balancing. With this framework, you can have producer/consumer, scatter/gather, and other parallel types of jobs.
The framework also monitors the execution of jobs, so if there is any type of hardware failure, other machines will get allocated the jobs that were running on the failed server.
CORBA is quite old. To choose a library or framework, the questions are: why do you want it to be distributed? (what's the goal? performance / parallelization? scalability? physical constraints on locations of parts of the system?) Which sort of nodes will be running the various parts? What languages would you rather use?
Recommend using ICE(Internet Communications Engine), ICE can support multiple operating system platform (Windows, Linux, Solars, Mac OS, iOS, Android...), multiple developing language (C++, Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, PHP), and it is simpler.
You can use SOAP web services. I'm currently developing distributed testing system on Python & .NET using using SOAP and it is easy to write and deploy.
There are a lot of different SOAP server/client libraries for different languages and platforms.
Yes, CORBA, and technologies like COM and DCOM are all pretty much obsolete... I am not sure exactly what you want to accomplish, but I would look towards .NET remoting to build distributed applications. If your application is really simple, you can even use mailslots or named pipes to pass simple data across a network.
As sinelaw mentioned, there are many questions before a good suggestion can be made, but, you may want to look at REST (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer) as a way to transfer data between applications. REST is nice in that what it can accept and return are flexible, for example, you can upload a file and return a PDF. Though it is used on http, that isn't the only allowed protocol. It is language/platform agnostic.
If you want to go with something that is standardized then SOAP or REST is probably your best bet, if you want to be platform-independent. If you don't mind being restricted to Java/JVM or .NET then there are other options, but that becomes very restricting.
What type of data is being passed? How critical is security? What platforms/languages should be usable? What is the purpose of the program, the goal?
If you want a portable solution that can also be used with different protocols, WCF on Mono might be a good fit
For .Net I suggest you WCF , it's quite simple to implement and very flexible, and about CORBA it's a good choice if your goal is to understand deeply distributed applications, but it's not more recommended for real projects, currently is very difficult to find developers mastering CORBA.
I need to monitor several systems going thru stress testing. I want to make a client-server .NET(C#) application that will ping the systems to check temperature, memory usage etc.
The client will provide system info (cpu-mem-hdd configuration) at start then it will undergo through several benchmark/stress tests. The server will keep track of what is been executed and also will be able to detect system crashes. I pretty much have all the code for the client (have been running on the system, using WMI)
I have no experience with .NET remoting nor WCF, but I think this is a great opportunity to learn them.
What technology would you use?
WCF is meant to unify .net remoting with a handful of other Microsoft technologies. WCF gives you a lot of flexibility to change the design of your client-server architecture simply by changing a few .net attributes.
I recommend you proceed with caution and make sure you have a good WCF reference at hand. You will spend a lot of time spinning your wheels in the mud without one.
Snmp, maybe based on http://www.snmpsharpnet.com/.
Nothing fancy, new and shiny, but a protocol that is meant to be used for exactly the stuff you describe. Would definitely be my first choice.
If that is not an option for you: Second choice for me would be WCF, because that can be used from different platforms (you are more flexible in the future).
i will choose service bus.
Is there a product (ideally open source, but not necessary), that would enable a zero dependency deployment? every service bus or queue library I've been able to find has a dependency on one of the queue apps (like msmq), or a database. I would like a very lightweight solution that I can just add a reference to my application, build it, and deploy it with as little configuration as possible.
In an ideal world, the queue/service bus would run on IIS, and allow web and rich clients to talk to it.
Such a tool would be ideal for fast prototyping of large distributed systems on a local development machine.
Rhino Queues from Ayende is exactly what you are looking for, this is the blog post introducing it:
http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/08/01/Rhino-Queues.aspx
I think that all of the limitations mentioned in this post have been fixed since then.
From the blog post, what rhino queues is:
XCopyable, Zero Administration, Embedded, Async queuing service
Robust in the face of networking outages
System.Transactions support
Fast
Works over HTTP
In a similar vein to ShuggyCoUk's suggestion, you could rig up a queue (or queues) using the Windows built-in ESENT database (comes already installed with Windows). There is a managed code access library (open source): http://www.codeplex.com/ManagedEsent. If you stick with writing / reading CLOBs or BLOBs, it should work just fine. If you want to be really clever, you can use NServiceBus and write (contribute?) ESENT-flavored subscription storage and transports. There are some forays into using ESENT on Ayende's blog as well (you'll have to poke around his SVN repository for the juicy bits).
If you're happy to be:
Windows specific
Limited to the local domain
Seriously limited in the message size supported
Wrap the underlying win32 calls in P/Invoke
Deal with the polling yourself
Deal with the hacks needed to allow back and forth communication
Deal with the shared config needed to keep the names in sync
Then a quick wrapper around the windows MailSlot API might be sufficient.
This simple example is a reasonable basis to start.
This article has some further information but assumes the use case is via a control (rather than a Component as it should be) as well as some poor WinForms integration so should be considered for incidental reading rather than a basis for any library.
This article is C++ but is of a higher standard (and a commenter has extended it to support the batching of larger messages into several smaller ones).
You get 424 bytes (so with .Net 212 chars) you may want to drop to ASCII to double your useful message length if you are talking text.
Note that despite its simplicity, limitations and lack of features it does provide multicast delivery, something often complex to layer on a point to point protocol yourself.
This ayende post provides and interesting comparison of three service buses. We use NServiceBus and think if it's not clear that Udi Dahan would respond to how you'd plug in non-dependent queue.
We work using MSMQ happily but there are other options and in theory it should be open to practically anything, given that you may lose some reliability and durability depending on your choice.
Why not Amazon's message service Simple Queue Service?
We moved our projects from MSMQ to ActiveMQ. its really better :)
ActiveMQ is open source queue ,based on Apache web server.
We used him in production on high frequently data workflow, where msmq have a lot of problem (we work with msmq a year)
The csharp implementation is nms
I'm currently working on an open source WCF based service bus. You can find it here: http://rockbus.codeplex.com/. It supports dynamic (#run-time) subscriptions, subcription repository (database), pluggable transports, XPath based content-based routing, transactional delivery over wcf protocols, roundrobin delivery, pluggable subscription evaluation, and more. Have a look!
Have you thought about using a service like IronMQ by http://Iron.io?
You wouldn't have any dependencies, could quickly prototype apps without setting up any queue infrastructure, and it's highly available and fast.
There is not currently a locally installable version but it's based on the upcoming OpenStack protocol so there will be.
Btw I work for Iron.
Try https://github.com/mcintyre321/PieQ - this is my attempt to write a threadsafe, persistent, zero-config, embedded work queue. It probably needs a little love, but I think it might be the kind of tool you are looking for.
I have developed an InMemory JMS library which can be used to in testing JMS applications without really connecting to JMS providers/server (Think of hsqldb). You don't have to deal with connection or protocol or anything, all you need to do is to send and receive messages.
https://github.com/Dhana-Krishnasamy/InMemoryJMS
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
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.
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.
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.