Question

I wrote an XNA 4.0 solution in VS2010 that can take a list of 3D Cartesian coordinates and produce a nice 3D visualization.

Periodically, I get a streamed in list of new coordinates from a telnet connection. I can redirect the output from the telnet session and have it issue an OS command to start up my program passing in the new list as a command line parameter. This starts up a new instance of the program, causes it to load all the assets and so forth and render the scene.

What would be keener is if I could somehow pass my application this data to the currently running instance so I could eliminate having multiple instances popping up and eliminate the asset load time of each new instance.

I’m not really sure what technologies or approaches to doing this entail. Is there an easy way to pass my C# program some data at run-time?

One approach I thought of was redirecting the output to a flatfile, and have my running instance check the flatfile for updates constantly. I’m not sure if performing such an IO hit 60 times a second is feasible, though.

Answer 1

OK if you want to do this with as little changes as possible (ie if you’re like me), I’d do it like this:

• my main application, the large XNA one, I’d have it start a TCP server on a port known to you, say 8012
• my telnet script would run a small application I wrote and send it the text as a parameter
  • this program would connect to port 8012 on localhost and send the parameter to my app
  • my main XNA app would be listening to it and add it to its dataset automatically