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.