Cross-Process Locking in C#

Question

I\'ve written an API that will be used on the same box in (1) a windows service, (2) a web application, and (3) a windows forms application. They all need to share a very s

Answer 1

Based on your question, it sounds like what you need it cross process communication. So one of the processes hosts the shared data and the other processes need to access that data.

If the above is correct, you could use simple in process locking like a Monitor to protect the shared data and expose a WCF endpoint to provide access to the data from another process. Using a Named Pipe transport for the WCf communication, will be very efficient for communication between processes on the same box.

There would be no need for cross process locking, unless you used a shared resource like a memory mapped file to share the data, but to be honest this would be cumbersome and require you to handle many things manually that WCF would take care of with the benefit that you could eventually scale of the single box to multiple boxes if you ever needed to.