How to send Integer through Anonymous Pipe using fixed 32 bit length?

Question

In my application I'm using an Anonymous Pipe to send messages containing an int, and enum (technically also an int), and a string. My pipe is setup and modeled exactly after the pipe in this MSDN article. I wan't to keep this as simple, and more importantly fast, as possible. What I wan't to do is make the first 32 bits of the message the int, the next 32 bits the enum, and everything remaining the message. How can I accomplish this?

I had originally though to just format the string to a certain length like in this answer, but the formatting actually produces different length strings if the number is negative vs positive. And this seems to be the wrong approach anyways, I feel like I need the binary representation of these ints, not a string representation.

Currently I send messages like this:

m_RemoteLogger = new Process();
m_RemoteLogger.StartInfo.FileName = @"C:\Work\Library\Utilities.Logging.exe";

m_LoggingStream = new AnonymousPipeServerStream(PipeDirection.Out, HandleInheritability.Inheritable);

// Pass the client process a handle to the server.
m_RemoteLogger.StartInfo.Arguments = m_LoggingStream.GetClientHandleAsString() + " \"" + m_Name + "\" \"" + m_Source + "\" " + m_Size;
m_RemoteLogger.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
m_RemoteLogger.Start();

m_LoggingStream.DisposeLocalCopyOfClientHandle();

m_LoggingStreamWriter = new StreamWriter(m_LoggingStream);
m_LoggingStreamWriter.AutoFlush = true;
// Send a 'sync message' and wait for client to receive it.
m_LoggingStreamWriter.WriteLine("SYNC");

m_LoggingStream.WaitForPipeDrain();

And Receive them like this:

if (args.Length > 0) {
    m_EventLog = CreateEventLog(args[1], args[2], int.Parse(args[3]));

    using (PipeStream pipeClient =
        new AnonymousPipeClientStream(PipeDirection.In, args[0])) {

        using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(pipeClient)) {
            string temp;

            // Wait for startup information from our creator. 
            do {
                temp = sr.ReadLine();
            }
            while (!temp.StartsWith("SYNC"));

            // Read messages to log from the stream and write to the event log
            while ((temp = sr.ReadLine()) != null) {
                var loggingInformation = LogMessageFormatter.ConvertFromString(temp);
                m_EventLog.WriteEntry(loggingInformation.Item1, loggingInformation.Item2,
                    loggingInformation.Item3);

            }
        }
    }
}

The LogMessageFormatter static methods are performing some custom serialization with delimiters, that I want to get away from.

Answer 1

You can use BinaryWriter to write binary data directly to the stream.

using (AnonymousPipeServerStream pipeServer =
        new AnonymousPipeServerStream(PipeDirection.Out,
        HandleInheritability.Inheritable))
    {
       // .......
       int id = 123456;
       string msg = "hello";
       using(var binWriter = new BinaryWriter(pipeServer))
       {
          binWriter.Write(id);
          binWriter.Write(msg);
       }
    }
}

On the other side of the pipe, use BinaryReader.

using (var rdr = new BinaryReader(pipeClient))
{
   int id = rdr.ReadInt32();
   string msg = rdr.ReadString();
}

Answer 2

If you want to read/write as binary - use BinaryReader and BinaryWriter instead of text-based StremReader/StreamWriter.

using (BinaryWriter sw = new StreamWriter(pipeServer))
{ 
     sw.Write((int)1234);
     sw.Write((int)someEnumValue);
     sw.Write("my text");
}