Regarding the design choices

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I'm required to design the bidirectional distributed communication between legacy (MFC based VC++ application) and .NET GUI application (going to be built in C#). I have considered several approaches like Managed C++ (IJW), WCF (as a framework for communciations), Sockets, Named Pipes. Please suggest.

Posted 18-Oct-11 9:23am

sundararaman

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 18-Oct-11 15:43pm

Same machine or network?
--SA

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2011-10-18T09:47:00

Solution 1

First, "Managed C++" was superseded by C++/CLI which you tag, so this is hardly an option. Everything else really depends on details of your requirements and even of the level you are familiar with the technologies. In this case, it's not possible to justify any advice of the type "use just this, nothing else".

Unfortunately, WCF for unmanaged part (legacy MFC application) seems too much of a hassle to me, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/686452/create-wcf-service-for-unmanaged-c-clients[^].

Sockets or Named Pipes? Both seem reasonable. I think, with Sockets its somewhat easier to write more portable code.

—SA

Posted 18-Oct-11 9:47am

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

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Simon Bang Terkildsen 18-Oct-11 16:00pm

My 5. That's an interesting link, I thought of implementing WCF in C++ as a hassle, I might change my mind after reading it all.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 18-Oct-11 17:01pm

Thank you, Simon.
You probably mean native Win32 development.
Well, yes, even though I put this link to confirm my view at all this as a hassle, the advice in the article shows that this is not so much of a hassle as I would think before.
--SA

sundararaman 18-Oct-11 16:10pm

Thanks for your suggestions. I thought the same, but I'm thinking of a design solution that will provide you the following facilities.
1. Future is .NET. so Gradually my solution helps the legacy code to be converted into .NET.
2. if I have a WCF kind of communication framework, in future communication can be changed from one option to other like tcp to named pipes and so on.

Regards,
Sundar

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 18-Oct-11 17:04pm

This is true. With WCF, you only change channels which are very independent from other aspects of communication. If this is an important priority for your project as well, it would be a huge plus in favor of WCF. And if you plan to get rid of native C++ part in future, this is an apparent benefit.
--SA

Espen Harlinn 18-Oct-11 19:20pm

5'ed!

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 18-Oct-11 19:58pm

Thank you, Espen.
--SA

Simon Bang Terkildsen · Answer 2 · 2011-10-18T09:57:00

WCF
Seems lake a hassle, to me, to write a host implementation of WCF in unmanaged C++.

Sockets
This is an option, however I've never really used them so I don't know how feasible it is. That said if you need to communicate with something like Java where you can't use Named Pipes.

Named Pipes
I would go with this one, if you're using .NET 3.5 or above as Named pipes wasn't introduced before .NET 3.5 . Note if you intend on using Mono then I'm not sure if Mono even implements Named Pipes.

MSMQ
Is also an option, though I guess that it is not a good one in your case, without knowing exactly what you want to do.

Espen Harlinn · Answer 3 · 2011-10-18T13:25:00

Solution 3

If you want to get the job done in a hurry - use COM Interop[^]

.Net has great support for COM, and COM enabling an MFC app is usually a straight forward process.

Best regards
Espen Harlinn

Posted 18-Oct-11 13:25pm

Espen Harlinn

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sundararaman 19-Oct-11 9:13am

Thanks Espen. But I want to know how far COM interop can be used for distributed communication. I guess it will be very complex. My MFC application sits on one machine and my .NET GUI application sits on the other machine.

Espen Harlinn 19-Oct-11 14:01pm

That shouldn't be a problem ... DCOM (Distrbuted COM) is based on DCE RPC. You just have to make sure things don't get blocked by firewall, and that DCOM is configured correctly

Regarding the design choices

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