Question

What would be the best way to communicate between a C and a C# process. I need to send messages containing commands and params and such from the C# process. to the C process. and the C process then has to be able to send reply’s.

I start the C process in the C# process.

What would be the best way to achieve this? I tried using stdin and stdout but this doesn’t work well (for some reason the stdin of the C process is spammed with some string (x(U+266C)Q) (U+266C is a UTF8 beamed sixteen note)

Answer 1

Do you really need as separate processes? If you own both codes why don’t you make interop calls by importing the c library methods:

class Program
{
    [DllImport("yourlibrary.dll")]
    public static extern int YourMethod(int parameter);

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(YourMethod(42));
    }
}

and in your C library you export your method using a .def file:

LIBRARY "yourlibrary"
  EXPORTS
     YourMethod