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Asked: 2026-05-27T14:36:31+00:00

I am writing a plugin for an application in C#. The plugin allows me

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I am writing a plugin for an application in C#. The plugin allows me full access to the internal information model for the application.

I would like to create a mechanism to allow external applications to be able to connect to the information so they can report on it etc.

In days of old this used to be achieved via ODBC links – is that still the way to go.

I assume it’s a significant task to create an ODBC driver for this, are there any easier recommendations or example C# code for cresting a driver.

Looking back I was not very clear in the original question. The requirement is to allow two applications on the same PC to share data. The “host” application use a proprietary storage format and as such access to the data cannot be achieved without using the “Host” application. The “host” applications allows the development of plugins (using C#) and the plugins have access to all of the data within the application. On that basis I was exploring whether a plugin could therefore expose an interface to an other external application and as such could act as a “Data Access Layer”

My reference to ODBC is probably a “red herring” – just shows how out of touch I am in this area.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Probably you are looking for something like Remoting and\or Web Services and\or the more modern WCF (windows communication foundation).

    You can write your own services and access to that services from every language you want.
    C# support for WCF and Remoting and WebServices is very good and allow you to write your server-client infrastructure in a very clean, object oriented and easy way.

    Use HTTP: each services is handled in a serialized object sent in XML through an HTTP server, for example, IIS.
    Clients can be written in every kind of language you want, from PHP to C# to C++ to JAVA to wathever, they need only to connect through HTTP and parse\deserialize\serialize XML.

    You can choose your architecture. If both clients and servers are written in C# all is transparent to you, serialization and deserialization of XML, remote procedure call and IIS integration are all ready for you to use. You need only to write your applications.

    You can export services instead of tables like a relational DBMS does, in this way you can divide the logic of your system from the data layer and the presentation layer.
    In this way you can obtain scalability, multiplatform and multisystem support.

    Some links to read:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Communication_Foundation

    http://www.codeproject.com/KB/webservices/myservice.aspx

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730857(v=vs.80).aspx

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kwdt6w2k(v=vs.71).aspx

    http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/bursteg/archive/2008/02/10/how-to-build-an-n-tier-application-with-wcf-and-datasets-in-visual-studio-2008.aspx

    http://msmvps.com/blogs/williamryan/archive/2008/05/16/doing-tiers-with-wcf.aspx

    Instead, if you are in an intranet, for example, or a single computer and you want just to share a DB service, you can just use SQLServer or MySql or PostgreSql and connect to it via TCP/IP.
    Is not safe\secure however to expose a DB service on internet or in an intranet where security can be a problem.

    Note also that SQLServer Express is free and may be suitable for you if you don’t have much users\connections or a DB not greater than 4gb.
    MySql and PostgreSql are free and open source.

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