How to share information with a new process (besides the command-line arguments)?

Question

I'm starting a new process with:

process.Start();

I know I can pass strings to it using:

process.StartInfo.Arguments = ...

But I want to share more than just a couple of simple strings – a byte array etc. How do I do that?

EDIT: This is going to be installed as a ClickOnce application, so I don't really know where it will be installed in the file system, and I want to keep it as simple as possible so no files will remain after an uninstall. So where do I put this data?

Answer 1

Take a look at memory mapped files - they allow you to share data between processes.

Alternatives are regular files, the registry, communicating over sockets and more.

Answer 2

If the array is small you can just base64 encode it. Other options consist of saving data to the file or using named pipes

Answer 3

You may want to use Anonymous Pipes .

Anonymous pipes offer less functionality than named pipes, but also require less overhead. You can use anonymous pipes to make interprocess communication on a local computer easier. You cannot use anonymous pipes for communication over a network.

Answer 4

You can create a temp file, write all required data into it and send result file name as a command line argument. When the second application run it will read the content of file and delete it.

Answer 5

if you can encode the byte array properly (eg base64), you can redirect stdin of the target process and stream it through that:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.processstartinfo.redirectstandardinput.aspx