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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T20:17:29+00:00

I remember using Named Pipes for communicating between 2 machines (back in Windows NT).

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I remember using Named Pipes for communicating between 2 machines (back in Windows NT).
How come now I read that Named Pipes are only for Inter Process Communication in the SAME machine? (in Vista and Windows 7)

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  1. Editorial Team

    Named pipes as an OS infrastructure are totally available for between-machine communication – see the MSDN docs on Named Pipes.

    Named pipes can be used to provide
    communication between processes on the
    same computer or between processes on
    different computers across a network.
    If the server service is running, all
    named pipes are accessible remotely.
    If you intend to use a named pipe
    locally only, deny access to NT
    AUTHORITY\NETWORK or switch to local
    RPC.

    However, I assume you might be talking about the WCF binding “NetNamedPipe” which indeed is on-same-machine-only communication. Why that’s the case is something you’d have to ask the WCF design team – I don’t have any information on that.

    But as Stephen C rightfully says – if you need machine-to-machine communication (in WCF), use the netTcpBinding instead – the two are fairly similar in their capabilities and their speed and feature set.

    See this article on the support added in .NET 3.5 for named pipes.

    Marc

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