Sockets – Win32 Sockets vs. Named Pipes

named-pipessocketswinapi

Is it possible to use sockets on Win32 and not have the firewall possibly block the port you are using?

In Unix, you can use IF_UNIX instead of IF_INET (i.e. named pipes instead of sockets). Right now in Windows you can open a socket using different protocols:

socket(AF_INET,    SOCK_RAW, IPPROTO_TCP);     //open an IPv4 socket
socket(AF_BTH,     SOCK_RAW, BTHPROTO_RFCOMM); //open a Bluetooth socket
socket(AF_NETBIOS, SOCK_RAW, IPPROTO_TCP);     //open an IPX/SPX socket
socket(AF_INET6,   SOCK_RAW, IPPROTO_TCP);     //open an IPv6 socket

Is there any way to open a named pipe socket? E.g. (hypothetical construct)

socket(AF_NAMEDPIPE, SOCK_RAW, IPPROTO_TCP);   //open a named pipe socket

Best Answer

As John Cavan (who I think I once went to school with) says, using the loopback address should avoid the NIC and firewall altogether, and also gives you the ability of changing to a full client-server model (i.e. separate machines, possibly on different platforms) later on with minimal code changes.

I have also used shared memory successfully for same-machine communications. This is generally faster that TCP/IP and named pipes. However, I have found named pipes on Win32 to be reliable and relatively fast.

Related Solutions

Sql-server – What are named pipes

Both on Windows and POSIX systems, named-pipes provide a way for inter-process communication to occur among processes running on the same machine. What named pipes give you is a way to send your data without having the performance penalty of involving the network stack.

Just like you have a server listening to a IP address/port for incoming requests, a server can also set up a named pipe which can listen for requests. In either cases, the client process (or the DB access library) must know the specific address (or pipe name) to send the request. Often, a commonly used standard default exists (much like port 80 for HTTP, SQL server uses port 1433 in TCP/IP; \\.\pipe\sql\query for a named pipe).

By setting up additional named pipes, you can have multiple DB servers running, each with its own request listeners.

The advantage of named pipes is that it is usually much faster, and frees up network stack resources.

-- BTW, in the Windows world, you can also have named pipes to remote machines -- but in that case, the named pipe is transported over TCP/IP, so you will lose performance. Use named pipes for local machine communication.

C# – Example of Named Pipes

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.IO.Pipes;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            StartServer();
            Task.Delay(1000).Wait();


            //Client
            var client = new NamedPipeClientStream("PipesOfPiece");
            client.Connect();
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(client);
            StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(client);

            while (true)
            {
                string input = Console.ReadLine();
                if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(input)) break;
                writer.WriteLine(input);
                writer.Flush();
                Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadLine());
            }
        }

        static void StartServer()
        {
            Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
            {
                var server = new NamedPipeServerStream("PipesOfPiece");
                server.WaitForConnection();
                StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(server);
                StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(server);
                while (true)
                {
                    var line = reader.ReadLine();
                    writer.WriteLine(String.Join("", line.Reverse()));
                    writer.Flush();
                }
            });
        }
    }
}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Sql-server – What are named pipes

C# – Example of Named Pipes

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