How can other apps talk to my .Net app?

[Terry H]

My clients want me to provide some kind of hooks or entry points into my
vb.net winform app, so that they can call it from their apps, passing in
some parameters to launch some particular function.

At first I was thinking along the lines of optional command line
parameters - any other app could simply call shell execute with myapp.exe
followed by param1, param2 etc arguments. I would check for these parameters
at start up, and act on them if they were there.

However, they want to be able to have my app already open, and then from
their app switch to mine.

What options do I have for exposing functions or hooks into my app from
other, non .Net apps?

Any ideas?

Thanks,

H

 

[Guest]

Use .Net remoting

There are various ways your application can listen to a request like tcp or http. You can write a separate component that the other applications can use. This component can implement all .Net remoting stuff

Guess there are obvious things you will have to consider like multi-threaded stuff

Divesh

 

[Helen W]

Thanks Divesh

Remoting doesn't seem applicable here 'cos the other apps that want to talk
to mine are not developed in .Net.

They are either Access or Delphi.

Sockets and tcp may be the way forward - but this is a more complicated
solution than they hoped - they do not want to have to write code to create
sockets and pass data through it to me. They were hoping for some kind of
Public/Global functions in my .Net assembly that they can call from within
Access. I don't think this is possible is it??

Thanks again

T

Use .Net remoting.

There are various ways your application can listen to a request like tcp

or http. You can write a separate component that the other applications can
use. This component can implement all .Net remoting stuff.

 

[Bp]

You can try either private windows messages or exposing exported functions
from your .NET assembly. These two are widely supported among all different
types of development environments so compatibility should not be an issue.

Your window can detect for a private windows message that other applications
can send you. The message and parameters combination can cover a range of
different commands.

If you're using C++ in .NET, you can also export functions that other
applications can call. If you're using VB.NET or C#, you can use a third
party component such as Desaware's SpyWorks to export functions.

BP